Winning a prize in the contest is not related to publishing your project. Circuit Cellar s criteria for picking which projects to publish is just deciding which ones will interest Circuit Cellar readers. Of course, you will certainly be able to count yourself among that group when your project is published and you are paid for the article. Block Diagrams for hardcopy submissions may be supplied as a printout from any drawing package. If an EPS file can be created from your program please send the file as well as the hardcopy.
Hand drawn diagrams are also acceptable if they are legible and precise.
Let's face it, this contest is about Atmel components used in various applications. It is not necessarily about proving that you have unique new ways to wire an AVR or FPGA in a circuit or that you soldered it together yourself. The real focus of this contest is the uniqueness of your application and the software written to execute it on an Atmel product. The easiest way to de-emphasize that you are using an Atmel development system or other commercial board in a project entry is to redraw the entry schematic to contain only the hardware circuitry necessary for the project. That tells the judges that, although you used a commercial board for convenience, you did it only for that reason and not because you wouldn't know how to configure the proper Atmel-component circuit.