Raspberry Pi home automation among cool tech at BTYSTE 2016 (video)

6 Jan 2016

Eve McGlinchey from St Leo's College in Carlow on Day 1 of the 2016 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition

An amazing home automation system built around Raspberry Pi and an inexpensive device that could help parents teach blind children to read braille are among the amazing accomplishments of Irish students on display at the 2016 BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE).

This year, more than 2,048 projects from 396 schools were entered in the annual BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition and this was whittled down by the judges to 550 projects.

Entries that caught our eye when we visited BTYSTE 2016 included Braille Pad, a device created by Jemin Joseph and Joel Antony from Colaiste Phadraig in Lucan that uses solenoids to create a device that can help parents teach blind children how to read at a fraction of the €7,000 a year it currently costs in Ireland.

Florrie McCarthy and Ernie McCarthy from Clonakilty Community College demonstrated how they created a genius HTML Raw Code Generator that can make HTML code for designing websites easier and less time consuming.

Sophie Bridgeman and Caoimhe Danaher from Desmond College in Limerick designed a glove that can help people with Parkinson’s disease to perform everyday tasks without difficulty.

And Eve McGlinchey from St Leo’s College in Carlow created an amazing voice-controlled home automation system using Raspberry Pi technology.

More than 1,134 students will compete at the exhibition, including 93 chemistry, physics and maths entries, 154 biological and ecological sciences entries, 97 for the technology category and 205 social and behavioural science entries.

For the second year in a row, there are more qualified project entries from Cork (118) than from Dublin (97).

Check out the video below to see some of these projects, and keep an eye on Siliconrepublic.com over the coming days for lots more news from BTYSTE 2016.

You can also read more about other projects we encountered on day one of the exhibition here.

 

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com