Meet the Winners of Nordic Semiconductor's Make it Matter Contest
Developers joined the challenge using a Matter-enabled development kit to create solutions that increase the quality of life in our homes.
Nordic’s Make it Matter contest called upon the Hackster community to create innovative, human-centered, Matter-ready smart home applications. Projects could be developed using any of the nRF5340 SoC-based DKs from Nordic Semiconductor, including the nRF7002 DK, nRF5340 DK, and the Nordic Thingy:53. Over the four-month period, 759 participants from 82 representative countries joined the contest, culminating with 61 final qualified submissions.
Without further ado, the top entries are...
1st Place: Gently Communicating Home Using Matter by Jens
Employing an innovative machine learning model to discern between good and bad posture, Jens' project integrates seamlessly with smart home lights to provide gentle reminders and indications for maintaining a healthy posture. This concept, while simple, proves to be incredibly practical.
The judging panel was impressed by the meticulous documentation, well-crafted prototype, and Jens' commendable enthusiasm in sharing not only the final outcome but also the insights gained and lessons learned throughout the project's journey.
“This matter project absolutely blew me away! The amount of awesomeness does not correctly get articulated by just summarizing it. From a very high level this project aims to address two issues: maintaining good posture while working from home & ensuring children complete their homework after school. The solution involves using smart home devices, such as lights, to provide feedback and act as an external control to encourage better habits. The feedback mechanism is designed to be subtle and non-disruptive," said Finn Boetius, contest judge and Product Marketing Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor.
“If you look at what Jens has done here, it is so much more, and he also explains it in detail and showcases it in videos. He integrated NFC, ML, voice recognition, and even generative AI in his project on top of the matter integration — Matter, for the obvious smart home integration; NFC for the person checking on the homework (they get a card that can give the “this homework is done” signal); ML for the posture recognition; Generative AI to process voice commands like “set a timer for tomorrow 6 to do homework. Besides all that he was very active in the contest discord helping other participants with their projects. In our opinion a well-deserved 1st price and we hope to see him again in the future.”
Chris LaPre, contest judge and Head of Technology at the Connectivity Standards Alliance added, "This idea is spot on my personal vision for what Matter can enable in the smart homes. Without having to worry about each different ecosystem or lighting app functionality, how can your home make things automatically more comfortable for you? It provides simple (and not distracting) feedback to help you achieve better posture. I’m floored (probably with bad posture). I love it!“
2nd Place: Smart Power Monitor by Serhiy Matviyenko
“A simple but well-executed project." Unlike traditional power monitors that only display total energy consumption, Serhiy Matviyenko's smart monitor measures various parameters such as power, current, voltage, AC frequency, and leakage current. It has the capability to detect overcurrent and overvoltage conditions and can automatically switch devices on or off based on predefined limits as well. This project showcases a good matter implementation and is a good example of how to differentiate a “generic” device like a smart switch to offer additional unique features while being interoperable with a greater smart home system. The judges especially enjoyed how Matviyenko's submission combined good hardware and software development.
3rd Place: MatTerraquarium by Silvio Vallorani and Simone Torquati
A love for Zephyr and a passion for home automation combined led to this ambitious attempt to create a smart habitat controller for a pet turtle. This build has an excellent implementation of Matter with multiple endpoints, demonstrating a good understanding of the technology. While the judges regret not being able to see the turtle in the video, they appreciate the innovation and passion displayed in this project.
Wild Card: PlantCabinet Controller by Philipp Manstein
The special wild card prize goes to the project that just blew our minds with its creativity. Philipp Manstein's indoor garden assistant brought a whole new vibe to the contest.
10 more winners who presented exceptional entries were awarded as runner-ups. The full winner list can be found on the contest page.
We express our gratitude to participants worldwide, as well as extend our heartfelt appreciation to the dedicated judges and organizers from Nordic and CSA for their unwavering commitment and hard work throughout this challenge.
