The 2014 Siemens Cyber Junkyard Challenge was won by the team from the College of Cape Town. Participants built an automated coffee bean roaster which has already secured commercial attention. The RGB52 full bed roaster is fitted with Siemens HMI colour touch panels to monitor the process, as well as a Siemens S71200 PLC with PID control. The College of Cape Town received R100 000 in Siemens products, and the students will benefit from R14 000 in Siemens training as well as each receiving a GoPro Hero 3 Silver Edition.
Congratulations to the College of Cape Town – first prize with their coffee bean roaster.
The first runner up was the team from Durban University of Technology with a fully automated cocktail machine using Siemens technology. Third place went to the Central University of Technology, with a semi-autonomous toolbox nicknamed Betsie, which follows a worker around the factory floor and plays instructive videos for the installation of parts, analyses faults and troubleshoots problems.
Eight teams from South African tertiary institutions competed for the Cyber Junkyard crown, subject to hours of judging and a tense interview session in front of a panel of industry experts. The teams were challenged by Siemens to engineer solutions of the future. This year the competition itself underwent some innovation. The students were challenged to build any industry solution with the Siemens technology they were given, and to create a business and marketing plan. This brought an element of business acumen to the challenge.
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