Two Year 3 Electrical and Electronic Engineering students, Likai Qiu and Ruiqi Zhang, from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), have won first prize in the AI + Hardware track with their “Xiaoling Smart Interactive Desk Lamp”.
More than 500 people applied, and around 150 developers formed 60 teams. Participants included students from Nanjing University, Tongji University, the Southern University of Science and Technology and many other institutions.
Given the supplied hardware and a posture-recognition task, the students developed an interactive desk lamp. It offers voice and gesture control, face tracking, posture recognition and weather information.
The lamp’s limited processing power could not handle complex visual recognition. The students sent camera footage via Wi-Fi to a computer for face detection, then sent commands back to a servo motor to turn the lamp head. Unstable connections and image-processing delays made face tracking unreliable.
“We made almost no progress for several hours,” they recalled. After repeated tests and algorithm adjustments, they found a solution and worked until 2 am. To save time, they used cardboard and double-sided tape instead of 3D printing. The prototype worked as intended and impressed the judges.
The students drew on an engineering design project from the Applied Electrical and Electronic Engineering: Construction Project module, one of the four national first-class undergraduate modules in the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Their team built a small car with wireless control, line-following and maze-navigation functions, gaining experience in Arduino IDE programming, OpenCV image processing and vision-based control.
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering, hands-on experience with real-world design projects is highly valued. This experience helped them use the hackathon hardware more quickly and reduced development time.
Both students were excited and surprised by the result. “Many things are not as difficult as they seem. If you dare to try and put your ideas into practice, you will always gain something.”
They plan to improve the lamp’s mechanics and interactive functions, and to develop a dedicated circuit board and casing. Their journey from a smart car design to a hackathon desk lamp shows how classroom learning becomes practical problem-solving. It also reflects UNNC’s commitment to combining academic study with engineering practice.