The winning team, ‘Park Life’, had travelled up from London to join the event. Their application used ultrasound sensors, built into cars, to locate and measure the availability of on street parking in real-time.

Teams were each provided with a ‘starter kit’ with micro PCs from Raspberry Pi and Arduino, and a range of sensors to help them face their challenges. They were also given access to Allia’s state-of-the-art rapid prototyping facility, the Innovation Lab, one of the UK’s leading IoT facilities, which provided a test environment fitted with a range of LPWAN systems to push their ideas.

‘The kit was great, we had lots of different ideas before settling on ParkLife, and we had everything we needed to make each of them work, there really wasn’t a limit to what you could build.’

The runner up prize went to IO Parking, who used land based sensors to achieve the same effect.