The team “Just DuoIT”, with Fábio Coutinho and José Domingues, from the 4th year of the MSc in Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications and grantees of IT, both supervised by Arnaldo Oliveira (IT/DETI-UA) won the competition Acelarador Blokus Duo in the Pro category. This competition took place within the XIV Jornadas sobre Sistemas Reconfiguráveis (REC 2018), that brought together the national scientific community interested and working around reconfigurable electronic systems, with emphasis on programmable digital devices called Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The event was held in the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the University Nova de Lisboa – FCT-UNL, in Monte da Caparica, last February 15-16.

Blokus Duo is a 2-player board game (14x14). Each player has 21 different pieces in each of four different colors and with a different number of game tiles. The player who places all the pieces first, or has the smallest number of tiles in his possession, wins the game.

Team “Just DuoIT” presented a solution based on a programmable "System-on-Chip" system implemented on a ZedBoard platform (http://zedboard.org/product/zedboard). The system developed includes standard hardware components and a specialized coprocessor that support the execution of a Blokus Duo player control software.

Besides the certificate, the winning duo also received a DE10-Standard kit (http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&No=1081), cortesy of Terasic and Intel FPGA.