D&K Engineering’s Keith Emery Honored

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 6 at the Silicon Valley Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA.

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 Design magazines. Emery emerged with a unanimous decision for first place.

Emery’s eLAWN offers multiple engineering applications, including abilities to track:

• Temperature
• Humidity
• Wind speed
• Ground moisture content
• Sprinker 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&K 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.

Says Bob Cross, Lantronix’s Senior Development VP; "This contest illustrates the endless possibilities of wireless networking. Engineers like Keith took advantage of a complete, integrated solution, with only imagination limiting them. We’re delighted with our creative submissions and congratulate our top winner."

D&K ( www.dkengineering.com) will be at booth 111 at the Del Mar Electronics Show at the Del Mar Fairgrounds on April 26 & 27.

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