On June 23, 2014 the first UDOO contest took place at the University of Siena, Italy. The contest involved about 20 students of DIISM (Department of Information Engineering and Mathematical Sciences) organized in groups to propose original projects based on the UDOO Board.

The UDOO-based projects were carried out as part of the Computers Architecture course held by Prof. Giorgi. Among the five finalist projects, two groups of students: Bianchini/Damiani/Masti and Giorni/Guidi were selected for ‘the most original project’ award and received a UDOO Board as prize. The boards were kindly donated by the company SECO. The selected projects were demonstrating applications related to distributed control of the light inside a house and interactive gaming and they will be soon shared as UDOO-tutorials on this web site.

The aim of the UDOO contest was to let the students becoming more familiar with applications based on a new concept of “Miniaturized Personal Computer” and its capability of interfacing with the physical world.

Prof. Giorgi said: “Computing Systems are more and more interfacing with the physical world (such system are also know as “Cyber-Physical Systems”). They are the heart of Robotics systems and they are also a worldwide strategic priority for research, especially in the European Union. An exponential growth of such systems is also expected due to the upcoming Internet-of-Things (IoT), the new evolution of Internet aimed at connecting not only people but also all kind of objects. I wanted to introduce students to this huge potential of interaction between computers and physical world – made ​​available by miniaturized systems like UDOO”.

The jury was composed by Dr. Caporali and prof. Rizzo of DISPOC (Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Science) and co-founders of UDOO and prof. Giorgi of DIISM (Department of Information Engineering and Mathematical Sciences) of University of Siena.