Some background on this years Imagine Cup, Embedded Competition

Earlier this week Kevin Morris from Embedded Technology Journal interviewed two teams that are taking part in the finals of this years Imagine Cup (happening next week in Korea), this years competition focuses on how technology can improve education world-wide - there are (as always) some amazing entries for the embedded competition - you can read the finalists reports here - and the interview with Kevin Morris here.

The competition got started back in November of last year with over 7000 students forming 450 teams to take part in the competition - 200 teams were selected to move forward to the main competition where they needed to build a custom CE 6.0 based operating system (which may include writing drivers, and applications) to run on an ICOP eBox 2300, a low cost, x86 based reference board - in many cases the teams needed to add support for specific hardware peripherals for their competition entry.

The finals are taking place next week in Korea, student teams will be required to present a report on their project and also will have to show their project running in the way they describe in their paper. Teams from past competitions have taken their amazing ideas through to a commercial product - This competition gives students the ability to get hands on with technologies in an environment very similar to building and shipping a commercial product which they may not get when taking a college course.

- Mike