Microsoft Corporation sponsored an international competition, titled Windows Embedded Student Challenge 2006. This contest was first organised in 2004 and has been held ever since. Due to the involvement of Microsoft, the competition attracts huge interest from the student community.
As part of the contest, the organizers (Microsoft Corporation) propose a theme for the competition and expects participating team to design and build projects in line with the theme. To help the design and implementation, it provides free hardware and software tools. The hardware platform is an x86 derived single board computer, called
Ebox. The software tools includes the Windows CE RTOS development suite.
Participants are expected to design their projects around the Ebox and WinCE RTOS.
This year around 230 teams sent proposals to the organizers, out of which 200 teams were selected and were provided with the abovementioned tools.
Out of these 200 teams, about 185 teams sent final reports which were evaluated by a team of judges to select the top 30 projects. The list of these top 30 teams together with their reports is available
here.
This year, the theme for the contest was "Preserving, Protecting and Enhancing the Environment".
The teams are supposed to follow eligibility rules as listed on the Windows Challenge website. One assumes that teams that do not meet the eligibility criterion, will be inelligible? Or so I thought.
Also, since this is a Microsoft spondored project, it is obvious that Microsoft's motive is to try and popularize the use of WInCE RTOS amongst the student community. The choice of Ebox is only to allow the operation of WInCE RTOS. It could as well have been any other hardware platform.
It is therefore natural to expect that a participant would develop a project that would justify the use of Ebox and WinCE RTOS. Or am I too naive to assume that?
It is worthwhile to note that the Ebox is a serious piece of hardware. It is an Vortex86 200 Mhz processor based, small foorprint embedded system with a serial port, a parallel port, 3 USB ports, an ethernet port, AV'97 audio, PS2 mouse and keyboard ports, VGA port. The Ebox consumes about 10W of power in active mode.
I was a mentor to a team from NSIT, which in my opinion implemented a wonderful project (which btw, is being patented now). Unfortunately, the judges did not deem the project as worthy of selection in the final 30 list.
My team brought to my notice that some of the teams did not meet the eligibility criterion. They also mentioned that many projects seemed very trivial for an Ebox. Many infact do not need any RTOS at all.
I then decided to read all the reports and make an assessment about such projects, which, in my opinion do not justify the use of an EBox and WinCE RTOS. My brief report about such projects is available
here.
Read it for yourself and make your own judgement and decide if these selected project deserve to be in top 30 by any measurement metrics? If you would like to read my team's report for comparison sake or otherwise, send me a mail at dvgadre@gmail.com and I will be more than glad to mail you a copy.
I have brought this to the notice of the organizers of WESC'06 but they have decided to ignore my feedback and go ahead with the contest as per the schedule.
I guess its bye bye future Microsoft contests, as far as I am concerned.
Dhananjay V. Gadre
