IEEE 2021 BlackBox Competition
Posted November 10, 2021
IEEE St. Louis Section Blackbox competition was held on November 6th, 2021 at the Missouri University of Science and Technology campus in Rolla, MO. Students from Washington University in St. Louis, Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, and Saint Louis University participated in two separate categories: analog and digital.
The analog black box completion is a contest where student teams (1 or 2 persons) are given an analog circuit enclosed in a “black box" and then asked to draw the electrical schematic of the circuit inside. The box contains only four terminals which the teams use to make electrical measurements that help them unravel the mystery of what is inside the box. This year Razi Khan, Ben Ko (WashU) & Emily Nunn, Andrew Kutz (SLU) finished third while Jaya Chitrakavi, Nicholas Chastain (SIUE) finished second. Evan Fitzgerald, Thomas Schuster (WashU) won the analog competition.
In the digital contest, students are given a programmable logic device with a pre-programmed circuit. As in the analog contest, students observe the behavior of the circuit and then are asked to describe the circuit which was programmed into an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based on their observations. Nicholas Tu, Thomas Lang (WashU) & Wyatt Marks, Kelsey Haines (SIUE) finished in Third Place while Will Galagher, David Mathus (SIUE) finished second. Yifei Li, Eric Biernacki (WashU) won the digital contest.
Congratulations to all the winners!
We would like to thank Drs. George Engel, Bob Becnel, and Maciej Zawodniak for their services as judges and also for encouraging participation from their respective institutions. We would also like to thank the Missouri S&T student team who organized the competition. Special thanks to Kylie Outlaw, Alex McKean, Patrick Mitchell, Austin King, and Raghu Yelugam.
As the winners of the Analog competition, the Washington University in St. Louis will be the hosts of Blackbox competition in 2023
