A TEAM from Malmesbury’s Dyson campus has won one of the firm’s internal innovation competition which featured more than 200 employees from the company’s global bases.

Groups in the UK and Singapore were given just 24 hours to complete the firm’s rapid development challenge which saw colleagues battle against each other to come up with a new product in just one day.

The genius inventors created devices including a self playing organ made with Dyson parts, a vaccuum cleaner that lit up when a large object was picked up, a virtual reality world which used 3D mapping from pictures taken by a drone and a remarkable app that could play ‘I spy with my little eye’ by using a phone’s camera to identify objects in a room.

Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard:

The winning group from Malmesbury modified one of the firm’s Jake Dyson CSYS lights by attaching motors and a pen to the body of the lamp and using computer programming to make it draw a portrait of Jake himself.

Darren Lewis, mechatronics design engineer from the winning team, said: “We first converted an image into line paths that a pen could trace.

“Position co-ordinates describing the paths were then sent from a laptop to an Arduino electronic board which drives three motors controlling movement on a modified Dyson CSYS light.

“The pen is coupled to our motors via our inventive drive mechanism which uses only one belt to control both the vertical and horizontal movements.”

The cross-continent event, which offers a rare glimpse into Dyson's development facilities, was held as a way of celebrating the company now employing more software engineers than hardware engineers as it looks to new technologies.

Dyson has committed £2.5bn to investment in future technologies and currently spends £7m a week in research and development.