An IT Carlow engineering student reached the finals of the respected Intel Galileo Third-Level Technology Competition for creating a smart device that ensures plants don’t get neglected as a result of our busy lifestyles.
Flower PiOT – Smart IoT Flower Pot was the entry by Yipeng Shen, a third-year electronic engineering student at IT Carlow, which ensured his place in the final alongside seven other students from GMIT, DIT, Dundalk IT and IADT. Shen created a smart device for flower pots that can download the current time and upload current soil moisture and temperature readings to the cloud. A smartphone displays the values and when the flower doesn’t have enough water, a red LED is turned on and an email is automatically sent to the owner, reminding them to water the plants.
“The faculty of engineering at IT Carlow is delighted for Shen to have reached the finals of this competition. Even more impressive is the fact that Flower PiOT was an extracurricular Internet of Things project that Shen worked on in parallel to his third year electronics programme project and that Shen, as a third-year student, was up against final year (4th year) projects”, commented Dr. Darren Kavanagh, lecturer in electronic engineering at IT Carlow and Shen’s project mentor.
Now in its second year, the Intel Galileo competition is an event for third-level students across Ireland to create unique technology design that incorporates the Irish-designed Intel Galileo board. The event took place at the Science Gallery, at Trinity College Dublin. The Intel Galileo board is the first in a family of Arduino*-certified development and prototyping boards based on Intel architecture. Introduced in 2014, the Galileo board was launched with the intention of helping students and makers to develop their own systems, mostly for the first time, by building the software from the ground up.
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For reference: Alma Feeley,
Communications Dept., IT Carlow
M: 087 8204934 T: 059 9175098
