At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose back in April, Digi International announced its quarterly "Go Green" competition and judging of the first quarter's entrants just got started. The competition ends on March 31, 2010, so there's plenty of time to enter and win a quarterly prize of $US 1500 and the grand prizes: $US 7500 for first place, $US 5000 for second place and US $2500 for third place. (Full disclosure: I'm an uncompensated competition judge.)

According to Joel Young, CTO and senior vice president of research and development at Digi International, competition categories include energy saving for electrical power, water, natural gas or fuel consumption, and for the elimination or monitoring of air pollution. Contestants must use one of three new iDigi wireless development kits that include the hardware, hosted software and services necessary to easily develop such applications.

Those three kits are the:

• iDigi X4 Starter Kit ZB.
• iDigi Wi-9P Starter Kit ZB.
• iDigi BL4S100 Add-on Kit ZB.

Engineers, entrepreneurs, experimenters, students, and others can purchase kits at reduced prices: $US 149 for engineers and $US 75 for students with valid student identification. Prices may vary outside the US. Contestants need not use Digi components exclusively for a design. Hint: visit distributors www.allamerican.com and www.onlinecomponents.com, that sponsor this blog.

For contest details and submission guidelines, visit: www.digi.com/designcontest.

Here's an opportunity to tackle a small portion of the resource conservation challenge and get your hands on a useful design kit at the same time. I have used Digi kits and find them well documented and easy to use as a development system. The company's Dynamic C software and add-on libraries simplify programming applications through the company's IDE.

--Jon Titus