Chicago – April 1, 2021: element14.com, an Avnet community, has announced the winners of it’s ‘One Meter of Pi’ design challenge. Members of the element14 community were asked to create a high-tech, sustainable farm within one square meter, or about 10-11 square feet. To help participants succeed, element14 teamed up with Raspberry Pi to provide 20 applicants with a kit featuring a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB single board computer along with multiple Pi accessories, including the Pimoroni PIM487 Automation Hat, PIM486 Enviro Hat, and the Pico HAT Hacker PC.

“We were blown away by the way our community members ran with this design challenge and produced some incredible results with Raspberry Pi,” said Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of Community and Social Media for the element14 Community. “The makers and engineers who make up our global community showcased their ingenuity and design expertise. We can’t wait to see what they come up with for the next challenge.”

After 20+ weeks of designing, researching, prototyping, coding, and testing, with 94 blog posts and 46 videos created, the Grand Prize was awarded to Bruno Santos from Portugal who integrated Twitter, time-lapse videos, and the Raspberry Pi camera to create an effective hydroponic garden, which resulted in one of the most fruitful setups seen in the challenge.

The Runner-Up, Milos Rasic from Serbia created an impressive multidisciplinary project, featuring a Nanny robot arm with 3D printed parts to tend to plants within an enclosure, interchangeable tooling and a robot for watering the plants; all controlled elegantly with a GUI and powered by Raspberry Pi.

Other participants in the design challenge who produced impressive results included:

• Wesley Gardner from Canada built a fully working garden that used watering hoses and optimized grow LEDs, off the shelf conduit and individually 3D printed connectors and joints to help achieve success.
• Satoshi Suzuki from the USA constructed a smart and effective hydroponic garden featuring self-pollinating and bug-catching plants, a closed loop water system, and AI computer vision using Tensor Flow.
• Hugo Hu from the USA created a simple but effective garden with timed lighting and watering features.
• Stephen Kruglewicz from the USA assembled a fantastic data-led project and was the first to grow spirulina instead of leafy plants.

To see all of the winning designs, and learn more about the element14 Community, visit: https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-96182/l/1-meter-of-pi-winners-announcement?ICID=DCH-1meterpi-topban. The element14 community’s newest ebook which focuses on urban and indoor farming, and features some of the winning designs from this challenge can also be downloaded from https://www.element14.com/community/community/publications/ebooks

Raspberry Pi boards and accessories used within the 1 meter of Pi challenge can be purchased from Newark in North America.