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. 
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: 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! 
