Touch Less, Do More

We are giving away tens of thousands of dollars in prizes to the top 5 projects, including product assessment and marketing support to bring your project to market! Our judges are going to pick the best qualifying projects based on the judging criteria outlined in the rules section.

Massimo Banzi, Arduino Co-founder, Interaction Designer, Educator and Open Source Hardware advocate. Massimo teaches Interaction Design at SUPSI Lugano in the south of Switzerland and is a visiting professor at CIID in Copenhagen.

Benedetta Piantella, designer turned humanitarian technologist. She has been involved in international development for the past ten years, and has also been teaching for the past decade in different disciplines and to different age groups, from Lego Robotics to K-12 students to HCI, Physical Computing and Engineering for Development at NYU.

Nishant Nishant, VP & Global Head of Digital at Avnet. Nishant has experience in defining IoT strategies for businesses, and has a BSc (Hons) in Electronics and Electrical Engineering.

Alessandro Ranellucci, Head of Open Source Products & Community at Arduino. Former Open Source Lead of the Italian Government, lead developer of the Slic3r 3D printing software, Interaction Design teacher.

Alex Glow creates videos about electronics at Hackster.io, and shares projects including her robot owl familiar Archimedes, music that has orbited the Earth, and LED temporary tattoos. She loves to hack on robots, music, wearables, bikes, cults, language, hackerspaces, brains and dreaming, holography, and more.

Need help bringing your ideas to life? While the whole Internet is at your disposal for inspiration, let us offer you a few pointers.

Many Arduino boards support WiFi and BLE (some of them at the same time).
Look at the MKR WiFi 1010, Nano 33 IoT or Nano 33 BLE:

The Nano 33 BLE Sense packs a whole range of high quality on-board sensors which allow you to recognise gestures, colours, sound and movement. Transferring such data over a BLE connection to your device (see this tutorial) is a few lines of code away. Start with the Chrome web browser via the Web BLE interface using P5.js and get running in minutes.

There are plenty of ways to detect touchless interactions. Measuring distance and proximity is a really common one. Take a look at a few projects using Time Of Flight (TOF), PIR, Ultrasonic, and RangeFinder sensors.

To move small objects, for instance flip a switch you could use a Servo Motor or replace the switch with a Relay altogether. Check out how to easily use these actuators with this and this tutorials.
All these sensors and actuators are supported in Arduino IDE via ready-available libraries which come with examples on how to use the code and the hardware. When you install the library for a specific sensor head to the `examples` folder and load one to get you started.

Should you encounters some bumps in the road don’t hesitate to hit the Arduino Forum where a vibrant and active community strives to help solve problems and find workarounds.

The Touch Less, Do More! contest is organized by Arduino and sponsored by Avnet, Hackster, Dragon Innovation, Newark.

Arduino is the world’s leading open-source hardware and software ecosystem. The mission of the company is to "Enable anyone to innovate, by making complex technology simple to use". Thanks to Arduino, pro designers, artists, hobbyists and students of all ages are learning to create things that light up, move, and respond to people, animals, plants, and the rest of the world. Over the years, Arduino has been used as the “brain” in thousands of projects. A worldwide community of makers has gathered around this open-source platform, moving from personal computing to personal fabrication, and contributing to a new world of participation, cooperation and sharing.

A big thanks to our partner sponsors for providing such a great support with this competition:

Avnet

Hackster

Dragon Innovation

Newark