What’s This Event About?
The SMART GREEN ISLAND MAKEATHON is back for its 8th year, bringing together 500 students, sponsors, and innovators to tackle sustainability challenges to the island of Gran Canaria, Spain. Organized by our member ITQ GmbH, the event fosters young talent, critical thinking, and hands-on collaboration.
The name says it all — Makeathon — means MAKing and HACKing! And we, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, are proud to be part of it, introducing young talents to real challegnes of the industry — the Digital Product Passport (DPP) and how to measure the energy consumption to shape a smarter, greener future.
A huge thank you to Dr. Rainer Stetter, whose vision to empower young talents back in 2016 turned into a tradition in Gran Canaria, with an increasing number of participants each year.
From now until Saturday, it’s all about collaborating, prototyping, and hands on innovation.
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Day 1: Kicking Off with Energy & Inspiration
This morning, Christian and I arrived at the INFECAR fair center, running into a buzzing crowd of 546 participants from 71 universities and vocational schools from all over Europe, along with 24 sponsoring companies. The atmosphere was great — it truly felt like a melting pot of young talent and industry experts eager to work together towards a smarter, greener world.
The official agenda started in the auditorium where we not only learned about the various challenges which were presented to the students, but also how the island of GRAN CANARIA is a perfect real-world lab for sustainable technologies, striving for energy independence and shifting away from fossil fuels.
Following the speeches, the industry challenges were presented, giving the students a chance to choose the projects they’ll dedicate themselves to in over the next four days.
Our role at the Makeathon
Our mission? Introducing the next generation to the Digital Product Passport because you can never start too early! And how are we planning to implement that? By adding a new layer to Murrelektronik’s challenge:
🔧 Shredding 🔥 melting, and 🦾 forming plastic into new components — a hands-on sustainability experiment.
And now here is where we come into play: tracking the energy consumption of the machines involved and measuring the environmental impact — bringing it to the next level by creating a digital twin. 💡
Students Dive Right In!
We had planned to start our Digital Product Passport workshop tomorrow, after the first machines have been configured and are up and running, but the students’ enthusiasm pushed us to get started today! Some were already familiar with DPP, while others were discovering it for the first time — but that didn’t slow them down.
In just a few hours, we had formed a motivated team of students from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland who started:
✅ Installing an MQTT broker and connecting the Shelly plugs for real-time data collection.
✅ Setting up Telegraf and Raspberry Pi for energy monitoring.
✅ Searching for Docker Compose files to streamline workflows.
✅ Coordinating with the shredding and melting teams to align processes.
WOW! Their drive, their questions, ideas and problem-solving skills were really inspiring!
We wrapped up the day with a stand-up meeting, with short presentations on every team’s progress.
Stay tuned—tomorrow’s going to be another exciting day!
⬅️ read about DAY 2