From the Powercast website:

Founded in 2003, Powercast developed a receiver module with breakthrough efficiency levels. Coupled with a transmitter that sends RF energy using algorithms developed by Powercast, the Powercast Wireless Power Platform™ was born. While the concept of sending power “through the air” has been discussed for more than 100 years, Powercast is the first company to make it commercially viable. Powercast is now leading the cross-industry initiative to bring wireless power to a hundreds of low power devices.

This is a wireless audio processing project. A 550 MHz transmitter transmits FM modulated data to a 5600 down converter. It down converts the data to 25MHz. That gets sent to a 5640R IF-RIO card. The IF-RIO card has an FPGA. That’s where all the demodulation and audio processing happens which then gets sent out the sound card. You get very low latency audio response.

Tomi’s done a great job on the graphics, and he cuts from wide to close up shots nicely. It takes a lot of work to produce decent video and Tomi’s efforts show in the resulting output. The audio needs some improvement. I think this can easily be solved by bringing the mic in closer or switching to a lavalier. I’m looking forward to more episodes.

I gotta hand it to the creators for coming up with imaginative names for all the varied body parts available in the game. Names such as: Pincernaut, Crockisser, Terrorpin, Gobsterclaw and Nubknuckle. Just to name a few. The physics of the creations is pretty realistic. If you have kids, put them in front of this and watch them learn.

In this video VI Shots interviews Ray Almgren who leads the worldwide academic relations program for National Instruments. We also interview several mentors and students to get their feedback on this change in direction for next years competition. Teams 2023, 1739, 47, 107 and 2053 are featured.