AISLER Vrijmarkt: Participate in our Reuse & Repair Challenge!

📣 Announcements
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On Monday, the Netherlands painted the streets orange for King’s Day :person_with_crown:. One of the highlights? The Vrijmarkt - a flea market where the Dutch give their old gear a second life.

But the Dutch spirit of reuse runs deeper than a street market. From launching the first Repair Café in Amsterdam to driving the European Right to Repair, they proved that the future of hardware is circular.

At AISLER, we know the European engineering community drives this movement. We build & we fix.

King’s Day is over, but we are keeping the stalls open. Welcome to The AISLER Vrijmarkt Challenge.

The Challenge

Great engineering rarely starts from scratch. Throughout May, we want to see your brilliant ‘Reuse’, ‘Upcycling’, and ‘Repair’ projects.

Show us how you keep electronics out of landfills. Give old tech a new pulse or hack existing hardware into something entirely new.

Need some inspiration?

Recently, one of our sponsored student teams took an old pizza oven and reworked it into a fully functional PCB reflow oven. Or another idea: Some people asked our team what to do with unused PCBs - do you have a creative idea? :orange_heart:

The Prizes :trophy:

At the end of May, our team will review all the submissions and select three best projects based on creativity, engineering ingenuity, and the spirit of circular engineering. If it’s hard to decide, we may ask for your help in a poll. :backhand_index_pointing_right::backhand_index_pointing_left:

The top three creators will win AISLER Store Credit to help fund their next prototype!

  • :1st_place_medal: 1st Place: €100.00
  • :2nd_place_medal: 2nd Place: €75.00
  • :3rd_place_medal: 3rd Place: €50.00

How to Enter

  1. Build & Share: Start a new topic in our Great Projects category. (Use our template to make it easy!)
  2. Tag It: Add the tag Vrijmarkt2026 to your post.
    How to tag the AISLER Vrijmarkt challenge
    How to tag the AISLER Vrijmarkt challenge741×148 8.5 KB
  3. Tell the Story: Upload your photos, or share links to videos. Tell us what you rescued and what the final project actually does.

Timeline

The Vrijmarkt is officially open! You have until Sunday, 31st of May 2026 at 23:59 CEST to submit your projects. We will announce the winners on Friday, 5th June 2026 at 13:00 CEST in our community.

Rummage through your spare parts drawers and let’s build a more sustainable future out of the things we already have.

Good luck! :netherlands::hammer_and_wrench::european_union:

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We have closed the stalls on our first-ever AISLER Vrijmarkt Challenge. We asked the community to champion the European Right to Repair by digging through their junk bins and showing us their most creative upcycling projects.

You showed us two awesome projects, that took home the prizes. :orange_heart:

:1st_place_medal: 1st Place: The Game Boy Advance HDMI Monitor

Prize: €100 AISLER Store Credit

Instead of letting a childhood Game Boy Advance gather dust, our first-place winner @manbuelk engineered a custom cartridge to turn the classic handheld into a fully functioning HDMI monitor.

The creator designed a custom 4-layer PCB in KiCad - manufactured by AISLER & assembled by @Manbuelk - to fit directly into the cartridge slot. Because standard microcontrollers cannot handle 250mb/s HDMI data streams, they built the board around a Trenz Electronic TE0890 FPGA module. By implementing a DVI receiver from scratch, they successfully memory-mapped the incoming video data to the GBA’s internal RAM via DMA.

The best part? The Game Boy Advance remains completely unmodified. This is a brilliant, highly complex hardware hack that gives a nostalgic piece of tech a completely new secondary use.

:2nd_place_medal: 2nd Place: The Pizza Reflow Oven

Prize: €75 AISLER Store Credit

Taking second place is the project that actually inspired this entire challenge. One of our sponsored student teams RoboterClub Aachen (a team of students from FH and RWTH Aachen) grew tired of hand-soldering large motor driver boards for their competition robots. So their team member @Hicham had a solution: Gutting a standard kitchen pizza oven and transforming it into a precise SMT reflow oven.

The team separated the architecture into custom High-Voltage (HV) and User-Interface (UI) boards. They implemented zero-crossing detection for the Triacs on the HV board to eliminate excessive EMI during switching. On the UI board, they utilised PT1000 sensors for precise temperature tracking and built a custom ILI9341 touch display to select hardcoded temperature profiles based on the solder type.

Massive congratulations to our winners & thank you for sharing these awesome projects! We already reached out to you via DM here in the Creative Community.

Thank you to everyone who followed along. We will see you for the next challenge! :european_union::recycling_symbol: