The blog of Gergely Orosz on Silverlight, .NET and other IT related topics. Follow me I still can’t believe it but it’s true: with team Digitalmania, Hungary we’ve won 3rd place on the Microsoft Imagine Cup world finals in Paris and were one of the 6 teams to receive the Innovation Accelerator prize in the main category, Software Design!! It’s amazing… we are also the first Hungarian team to make it to the top 6 teams on the world finals as well!
Presenting at the finals, in the Louvre
The whole competition started a few months ago when we’ve decided to enter the Imagine Cup competiton. We’ve managed to win the Hungarian national round which made us qualify for the world finals among with 60 other teams across the globe. The world finals took place for 6 days. The firs few days there were qualifiers from where 12 teams advanced to the semi-finals. After another round 6 of the 12 teams were selected for the grand final. The qualifiers and semi-finals were closed to the audience, whereas the grand final was in front of about 2,000 people in the Louvre! I never expected to be presenting in front of this many people!
Our project for the competition, Green Watering, was an intelligent automatic watering system that uses the least water possible by monitoring soil moisture, tracking weather and using custom watering rules. The structure of the system looks like this:
We’ve used numerous technologies to put the system together: fiddled with hardware to put the sensors together, used .NET to communicate with the computer, built a web client using MSSQL, ASP.NET and Silverlight to manage it and built a simulation table using small pipes and sensors and microcontrollers to demonstrate the system in action in really small scale.
The simulation table, the team and our mentor
It was a fantastic week… and what’s more thanks to the Innovation Accelerator prize it doesn’t end all here: early 2009 we’ll be participating in some kind of bootcamp further working on commercial availability of the project!
Innovation Accelerator Winners!
The top 3 teams: Australia, Slovakia, Hungary!
Congratulations to all other participating teams as well – it was a great time!
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