| 2004 |
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YEAR BOOK |
Our Lady's Secondary School, Templemore, Co. Tipperary
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Phone for power
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For the competition, I developed an electronic system which allows a person to switch on and off up to ten electrical appliances in his or her home or office. The only requirement to operate this system is access to a phone.
To switch on an appliance, the owner must ring the number of the system, type in his/her personal password, and select which appliance he/she wants to switch on by choosing from the keys of 0 � 9 on the phone, followed by the # key. To switch off the appliance, the person goes through the same procedure, selecting an appliance again from the keys 0 � 9 and pressing the * key.
The system consists of printed circuit boards, relays, IC circuitry, a mobile phone, transformer and rectifier, 220 volt a.c. contactors for switching the mains voltage, and other small bits of circuitry. All the elements are integrated in a single box which requires only a mains supply to be fully operated.
The system uses a mobile phone to receive sound signals, which are produced when a digit is pressed on the caller's phone. This frequency is then transformed into a specific voltage for each one of the tones. This is the logic behind the idea. The Integrated Circuit chips in the circuit then switch on contactors which in turn switch on each of the appliances.
Vincent Heffernan won third prize in the Senior Individual Section in the Technology Category at the EsatBT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in January 2004. He also won a special award presented by Analog Devices. His teacher was Ms Kay O'Regan.
| This article was sponsored by Analog Devices |
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