After my experience in last years Young Scientist Exhibition I decided that I would definitely try and enter again this year. After a lot of thought I decided upon my project entitled ‘Energy Saving through Automation’. In a nutshell I created an automation system for controlling household appliances and domestic lighting to combat standby power wasting.

Fortunately my project won two prizes, being 1st in Intermediate Technology Individual and the Science Foundation of Ireland special award which is given for research/engineering in the field of energy conservation technology.

The electronics part of the project was created using the Arduino micro-controller platform. For those that don’t know what the Arduino is, its a prototyping electronics platform created for hobbyists, by hobbyists. The Arduino provided the perfect platform on which to start working with electronics. The board itself runs its own variant of C/C++ and the support forums and language reference are to say the least, second to none.

Read the rest of this post…