University of Padua students celebrate Arduino’s 20th anniversary with innovative projects

To mark Arduino’s 20th anniversary, the IEEE Student Branch at the University of Padua organized a special competition that challenged students to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The summer-long contest culminated in a presentation on November 19th at the Department of Information Engineering, where three teams showcased projects ranging from gesture-controlled vehicles to environmental monitoring stations and smart swimming sensors.

Inspiring student innovation through hands-on engineering

Professor Matteo Meneghini, advisor of the IEEE Student Branch, explains the motivation behind the event: “The initiative was born with the aim of stimulating creativity, design skills, and teamwork in our students – key elements in the world of engineering and innovation. Through this challenge, participants were able to put their skills into practice and transform ideas into real prototypes. We are proud to offer them a concrete opportunity for growth, experimentation, and comparison, and we are grateful to Arduino for supporting this initiative, which underscores the importance of an active synergy between industry and university.”

At the presentation, Martino Facchin, Hardware/Firmware Manager at Arduino, had the opportunity to meet the students and learn about their projects firsthand. “It’s incredibly rewarding to see students take an idea from concept to reality using the Arduino ecosystem,” said Facchin. “These projects demonstrate exactly what Arduino hoped to achieve when it started 20 years ago – making electronics and programming accessible so that anyone with curiosity and determination can bring their innovations to life. The creativity and technical skill on display here shows the bright future of engineering.” To reward the students’ efforts, Arduino granted each team a €150 special discount to get more hardware for their next ideas.

Curious to find out more? Let’s meet the teams and their projects!

Cars Electric: gesture-controlled vehicle with integrated radar

Riccardo Gabriele Similachi and Francesco D’Addato, both second-year students at the University of Padua (Biomedical Engineering and Electronic Engineering respectively), created a remote-controlled car that responds to hand gestures rather than a traditional joystick. The project, playfully named after the Pixar film, integrates AI-powered gesture recognition with wireless communication and radar sensing.

The system uses Python®-based machine learning to recognize hand movements, which are then translated into vehicle commands via Bluetooth®. “We wanted to go beyond the ordinary,” explains Similachi. “Anyone can build a joystick-controlled car. We imagined a system where multiple different devices collaborate with each other, communicating wirelessly through signals and data traveling through the air.”

The vehicle features an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board, HC-05 Bluetooth® module, four 6-V gear motors, and an integrated radar system with both automatic and manual modes. The radar, controlled by a second Arduino UNO board, uses an ultrasonic sensor and servo motor to detect obstacles.

One of the biggest technical challenges was developing a flexible gesture recognition system. “With traditional programming, managing all the variables – 0 to 5 fingers raised, right or left hand, different finger combinations, varying distances from the camera – was complicated and imprecise,” Riccardo notes. Their solution: a two-part algorithm with training and recognition phases that learns gestures as patterns and can identify them in real-time.

Env.Eye: solar-powered environmental monitoring station

Giacomo Pascon, Giorgio Sacchiero, and Cristian Piccone, all 20-year-old Electronic Engineering students, reimagined the classic IoT weather station with a focus on extreme energy efficiency. Their Env.Eye system consists of two modules: a “Spot” unit that collects environmental data (temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and even radiation via a Geiger counter), and a “Hub” that uploads the information to Arduino Cloud.

The real innovation lies in the power management. The Spot module is powered by a solar panel and supercapacitors, operating at ultra-low voltages (around 2.2 volts) thanks to a Texas Instruments chip designed for milliwatt-level energy harvesting. An Arduino Nano ESP32 manages both the sensors and intelligent power distribution, while LoRa® handles communication between modules.

“The power supply section required the most attention,” explains Pascon. “An incorrect configuration of the power management IC and selecting an insufficient solar panel initially didn’t provide enough autonomy. Fortunately, the solution was simpler than expected – we just needed to upgrade the panel and make a slight modification to the circuitry.”

The team also pushed beyond the standard Arduino development environment, programming at a lower level using Espressif’s syntax to maximize the ESP32’s potential. The project will soon be available on GitHub for the maker community to replicate and evolve.

A smart swimming sensor: Performance analytics for athletes

Computer engineering students Diego De Luca (19 years old) and Samuele Tomasi (18) combined their passion for swimming with their technical skills to create a wearable device that helps swimmers analyze and improve their technique. The Arduino-based anklet measures acceleration across three axes along with gyroscope and magnetometer data to identify proper turns in breaststroke, backstroke, crawl, and butterfly, as well as evaluating kick quality.

“I’ve always wanted to create a tool for swimming, so this was the best moment to express our idea,” says De Luca. The filtered sensor data is transmitted via Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) in small packets to a companion app developed in Kotlin.

The biggest challenge? Learning BLE technology. “We didn’t know anything about it, so it took the most time to implement correctly,” Tomasi explains. “We learned from various tutorials and guides online.”

Despite being new to Arduino, the duo found the experience invaluable. “It was very difficult for two young students to create something from scratch, but this is the best opportunity to learn something new, which could be very useful for our future careers,” they note. “Maybe in a few years we will launch our own startup.”

The power of making

These three projects exemplify the spirit of the maker movement – students identifying real problems, learning new skills, and building functional prototypes that showcase both technical competence and creative thinking. We are proud to have collaborated with the University of Padua’s IEEE Student Branch to prove how accessible technology platforms can empower the next generation of engineers to turn ambitious ideas into reality.

Congratulations to all the participants, and here’s to the next 20 years of making!