The 7400 Logic Competition has drawn to a close. The winners were announced and there are quite a few of them. There were fifteen first place winners named, nine second place, and nineteen third place projects. The bounty of quality entries is a testament to the popularity of the contest. It helps to have a wide range of prizes and the post linked above lists all of the sponsors who donated goodies as an incentive.
The board seen above was awarded the reader’s choice, to which the grand prize was awarded. It is a 7400 series calculator. [Umair Mukati] and [Naveed Ahmed] — both are students at the Institute of Industrial Electronics Engineering in Karachi, Pakistan — developed the device as part of a class project. It is capable of adding or subtracting two digit numbers. This includes support for negative numbers as results. We’ve embedded a video demo of the calculator in action after the break.
[Thanks Nick]
So, its been awhile since I was in school, but in my digital logic course we built an 8bit calculator. The difference here are the push buttons and there they just used a chip that did the conversion with a shift register to make it work. I guess I was expecting more from the grand prize winner. I thought the FPGA, and RFID were the top projects.
It’s a 74xx series competition. No FPGAs last time I checked…
1 FPGA
http://hackaday.com/2012/11/01/discrete-fpga-will-probably-win-the-7400-logic-competition/
One of the entries was a “discrete FPGA”, an FPGA clone made of discrete logic.
http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/11/06/7400-competition-entry-build-your-own-fpga/
Yeah, I thought the FPGA was clearly a winner…
Having read it the FPGA did grab a first place prize :)
No, its great that he won first place, but to have the FPGA loose to the calculator just seems strange.
Damn it. Lose, not loose. Argh.
the guys who made the calculator got their whole class to vote, so that’s why they won
it’s not a bad project, but probably not what i’d call the “winner”
there were a lot of good projects
The ballot was clearly stuffed by friends of the winner. It’s a bit of a shame, but it wasn’t against the rules – and the Grand Prize isn’t really any different from the First Prizes anyway.
http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/11/07/7400-competition-entries-and-readers-choice-2/#comment-98549
I’m thinking many people voted for the calculator because they know what it is while FPGAs and RFID just goes above their heads.
Not only extreme electronics nerds vote on these things.
Some of the second and third places are much better then some of the first places. Strange rating. The BEAM robot for example is simply fake as the circuit is trivial and can be found a hundred times by typing “beam+circuit” into google’s picture search.
It’s also strange that the “CPLD-based 8×8 game-of-life” can be found in this contest and even reaches 1st place.