Arduino is an open source computer platform that can be used to control electronic devices, and is often used by TU/e students. Chinmay Gore, Aabharan Hemanth and Jay Nagdeo had each entered individually for the Arduino competition. When they attended the introduction Day in Hengelo, Thales placed them together in a team. Gore and Nagdeo are both Master's students of Embedded Systems, Hemanth is a Bachelor's student of Industrial Design. They call themselves Team Geo.

The team received a starter pack of electronic components and the instruction to submit a video within three weeks. It was an open assignment that they could fulfill as they wished as long as the product built with the Arduino kit had something to do with aviation, space, transport, defense or security, Thales's core interests.

The students designed a Geo encryptor with which a ship in wartime can safely send messages to its naval base. Security is ensured because the coding key the students came up with changes automatically every time the ship's location changes. Their bright idea was to make this rely on the high-tech radar systems produced by Thales.

Online voting

From each of the five Dutch student cities a city winner was chosen. These teams were invited back to Hengelo to pitch their project. Gore and his team members were sufficiently persuasive that the Thales jury declared them the Dutch national winner. Online voting in the next round ends May 17. From this process, of the nine participating countries, three will emerge as participants in the final. The  ultimate winner will be invited to visit the Thales research centre in Paris. They would be honored to do so: “We feel proud to represent the Netherlands on the global level and we request everyone to vote for the Netherlands and TU/e.”

Update May 31: Team GeoEncryptor (the Netherlands) is the winner of this year's Project Arduino competition by Thales. After the public voting stage, Thales selected the top 3 teams - team Netherlands, team France and team China-HongKong. Then the Thales jury panel deliberated the videos in France and came up with the global winner.

Thales chose the TU/e-team as the global winners because:"The quality of the projects this year was outstanding, and it was a very close call with the other finalists. Team GeoEncryptor deserves the title of Project Arduino 2017/2018 Champions as they targeted one of our core businesses, cybersecurity, therefore demonstrating their research and knowledge on Thales and in this particular area. They developed a way of securing communications in the naval domain by using an encryption code with accurate GPS location, integrating it with a static key (encrypted messages) to make a dynamic key, therefore making it much harder for intruders to break the code and read the messages. We were particularly impressed by the maturity of the idea and how they presented this in a clear and engaging way through their video, adding some humour into what is a very complex topic."