Farnell wants to keep “buzzy” at electronica

At next week’s electronica in Munich (15-18 November) Farnell is hosting a competition in association with  nearBees, an online platform designed to assist beekeepers in Germany in establishing and maintaining local honeybee colonies.

Members of the element14 Community can enter the Save the Bees design challenge, using Ardunio’s MKR1310 and Arduino Pro Nicla vision boards to create a project that will protect bees and their environments to maintain the bee population. Entries are encouraged from professional design engineers, electronics enthusiasts, teachers and students.

Throughout the show, there will be regular, live presentations featuring a prototype project to help combat Braulidae (bee lice) on Farnell’s Stand (Hall C2 -101 in the Avnet Village).

Winners will receive one of 50 major product prizes, including and Arduino Pro Nicla Vision board and an Arduino MKR1310 development board. The vision board has a compact 2MP colour camera and combines AI and industrial-grade sensors and STMicroelectronics’ STM32H747AII6 dual Arm Cortex processor.

The development board combines an M7 core operating at up to 480Mhz and a M4 core up to 240Mhz.

Both boards can be battery-powered for standalone applications.

Challengers have 11 weeks to build a project to save bees. To qualify, they are required to blog five times within the Challenge Space in the online community. The winners will be announced by the end of March 2023.

Join the ‘Save the Bees’ design challenge: element14 Design Challenge page.

(Almost 80% of all plants, and around one third of food production, depends on cross-pollination by honeybees. Starting this month, Farnell will sponsor five honeybee colonies in Germany for a minimum of one year to safeguard up to a quarter of a million honeybees.)