Seeed Studio × hackTurin: Bringing Hardware and Mentorship to 100 Young Engineers in Turin
From Shenzhen to Turin: Seeed supports local innovation events around the world — and hackTurin is one of them. 100 young engineers, €10,000 in prizes, Grove hardware in every hand, and a Seeed Ranger mentoring at the bench.
Why We Support Events Like HackTurin
Seeed Studio was born in a Shenzhen makerspace in 2008. We know firsthand that local innovation events are where the next generation of engineers starts — where a first prototype becomes a team, and a team becomes a company. Supporting them is not sponsorship to us; it is how we grow the ecosystem we came from.
HackTurin is exactly that kind of event. Organized by Apeira — Italy’s first hacker house, a highly selective program connecting Europe’s sharpest young deep-tech talent — it brought together 100 selected engineers and makers from leading Italian universities, with €10,000 in prizes across three challenges: safer urban mobility, solar-energy maintenance, and technology for non-profits.
Our support came in three forms: hardware — Grove modules and Seeed components for every team; mentorship — a Seeed Ranger on-site guiding teams through the build; and amplification — sharing the projects and stories that emerged from the weekend.
Turin in October: A Showcase of Hardware Talent
On October 9–11, hackTurin took place — Italy’s largest hardware hackathon. 100 young engineers from across Italy (one even traveled from EPFL in Switzerland) spent 48 hours building hardware across the three challenge tracks.
The winning and standout projects were genuinely exciting:
- 🏆 SolarEcho AI (Beyond Solar winner): an embedded system using piezoelectric sensors and on-device AI to analyze vibrations in photovoltaic panels — detecting impacts and flagging structural anomalies before they become expensive problems.
- EGG: a low-cost edge-AI node using computer vision to monitor pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles, adapt traffic lights and identify dangerous intersections. The team is exploring turning it into a startup.
- Fà Ballà L’Oeucc: a device mounted on the back of an e-scooter using a camera, ultrasonic sensing and local AI to detect approaching vehicles, with LED strips inside the rider’s helmet showing which side the danger comes from — it can also detect falls and map potholes.
- O.M.B.R.A.: a solar-panel monitoring system built with Seeed Grove current sensors and relays that distinguishes clouds, temporary shade, dirt and fixed obstacles, and recommends the right maintenance action.
There was even an unexpected VIP visit: Turin’s Deputy Mayor stopped by to see what the teams were building — and was very enthusiastic about the event.
Grove: Letting Ideas Move Faster
Feedback from participants was consistent: Grove modules were plug-and-play and easy to integrate, letting teams test ideas and iterate quickly within a tight time window. All Seeed-supplied components were clearly marked in the event inventory, and every team had hands-on time with Grove modules.
Just as importantly — the hardware went home with the teams. Nothing was locked in a warehouse. As Apeira noted: teams from their June HackRome hackathon are still building together, and one team that met there has since raised €400k in pre-seed funding for a healthcare access project. That’s what supporting local innovation is really about: not a one-off event, but the starting line for projects.
Davide as a Seeed Ranger: Guiding the Next Generation
One of the most valuable parts of this collaboration was having Davide Gomba on site as a Seeed Ranger throughout hackTurin — mentoring teams at the bench and serving as judge for the Beyond Solar challenge, the renewable-energy track that was the natural fit for Seeed to judge.
Davide’s roots run deep in Turin’s maker scene: he co-founded the city’s Fab Lab and the Arduino Office, and he brought that experience to every conversation with the teams — helping them think not just about whether a prototype works, but about what it takes to build something that lasts.
For the participants, having a Ranger in the room meant more than hardware support. It meant someone who had been where they are — and who could show them the way forward.
Open, Public, Sustainable
All projects are public on Devpost, with two-minute demo videos, GitHub repositories and full hardware lists. So these become open sourced and sharing with the world.
This is how Seeed grows around the world — one community, one event, one batch of projects at a time. From Shenzhen to Turin, from Boston to Barcelona: we show up with hardware, mentorship and belief in local makers.
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