News
// D&K Engineering's Keith Emery Honored
San Diego, CA – April 24, 2006 — Keith Emery, mechanical engineer for D&K Engineering in Rancho Bernardo, CA, has won first prize in the 2006 Lantronix Wireless Design Contest for his eLAWN™ programmable sprinkler controller. The top honor was announced April 6th at the Silicon Valley Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose.
With D&K since 2004, Emery received an Innovative Recognition Award and $5,000 first prize from Lantronix. He had stiff competition from hundreds of the top designing minds around the globe, according to Lantronix’s Kristine Hernandez.
Entrants submitted written ideas before those deemed worthy of development became working prototypes. Contest entries were judged for:
- Technical Merit
- Originality
- Usefulness
- Cost-effectiveness
- Design Optimization
Final decisions of first, second and third place winners came from Editors of Electronic Design and Machine magazines. Emery emerged with unanimous decision for first place.
Emery’s eLAWN offers multiple engineering applications, including abilities to track:
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Wind Speed
- Ground Moisture Content
- Sprinkler Manifold Water Pressure
eLAWN shuts off sprinkler heads if malfunctions are detected, emailing status changes to property owners. With problems resolved or environmental anomalies, eliminated, the system reverts to its original watering schedule. Users can adjust the system from any computer around the world.
“The patent-pending eLAWN becomes a weather station for home or office” says Emery. “Including embedded web server capabilities into the home is unquestionably in our future.”
D&C company president, Alex Kunczynski, observes: “We’re incredibly proud of Keith for his accomplishment, but not remotely surprised. Keith represents the people throughout our R&D department – innovative engineers who have vision to leverage technology to effectively develop great products. Keith’s inventive spirit exemplifies one of our team’s core competencies.”
Lantronix (www.lantronix.com) helps businesses and government agencies manage network infrastructure equipment and rapidly network-enable their physical electronic devices. The company challenged industry designers worldwide to develop devices utilizing their WiPort embedded 802.11 networking module.
