Digi (Minnetonka, Minn) said contest categories include energy saving for electrical consumption, energy saving for water consumption, natural gas or fuel consumption, and eliminating or monitoring air pollution.

Contestants must use one of three new iDigi wireless development kits on the design entries. These kits, based on the company's new iDigi platform, are optimized for green applications and include hardware, hosted software and services, according to Digi.

The green design contest began Wednesday (April 1) and is scheduled to run through March 31, 2010. Digi plans to announced the grand prize winners at ESC Silicon Valley 2010. Individual quarterly winners will be announced for each quarter leading up to that.

More information is available on the contest Web site. Digi plans to post all of the contest entries here.

Winners will be selected by a team of judges made up mostly of Digi executives, the company said.