Get a Raspberry Pi and a Trip to Vegas With Our Z-Wave Smart Home Maker Challenge

Make: and Sigma Designs want to see what the maker community can do with Sigma’s open source Z-Wave technology. To find out, we’ve just launched a new connected-home challenge, asking you makers to design and submit smart-home innovations that can relate to anything from security to assistive technology to energy management. Your project doesn’t have to have any commercial application: it just has to make your home more convenient, comfortable, affordable, or fun for you and your family (including pets)!

Much of your home’s inter-device communication is powered by Z-Wave technology from Sigma Designs. The Z-Wave Alliance includes 600 companies, who collectively have produced more than 2,100 commercial products, all interoperable with each other. The company last year made the interoperability layer of its Z-Wave open to the public so that academia, analysts, and, yes, makers can start using it without having to join the Z-Wave Alliance.

The comprehensive Z-Wave middleware layer developed by Sigma Designs is now available, pre-loaded on a Raspberry Pi, complete with a Web API, so you can communicate with thousands of Z-Wave products, including a bunch that probably already live in your house. Use these as a basis for designing your submission ideas. And don’t drag your feet on it — Sigma will send the first 50 qualifying submissions a starter kit, including a Raspberry Pi 3 and USB Z-Wave Controller stick, to help them prototype their idea.

Grand prize for the challenge is a trip to CES 2018 in Las Vegas, where you’ll get to show off your project within the Z-Wave Alliance Smart Home Pavilion. You get to keep the IP for this, so it’s a great way to market your killer idea at the biggest gathering of its kind. First and second runner ups will receive $2000 and $1000 worth of Z-Wave-certified devices, respectively.

So, makers, you are now empowered to order all those devices around: what do you think they should do? Navigate to the challenge page on Maker Share and get going.