PA Consulting and Raspberry PI Have Selected The Finalists of Their Programming Challenge

PA Consulting and Raspberry Pi have selected the finalists of their programming challenge who will present their ideas to six expert judges on 20 March.

The competition was intended for school and university students to present interesting design ideas demonstrating their programming skills using the Raspberry Pi.

Example of the ideas that have made it through to the final round:

• an automated pill dispenser which makes managing medicine easier. The Raspberry Pi connects a pill dispenser and a GP, who can programme the administration of a patient’s drugs through a website; the correct dosage then drops out of the pill dispenser at specific times
• an automatic door answering system designed to help elderly and disabled people answer their front door
• an air quality and weather surveillance device which takes in information about air quality through its sensors and uploads it directly to the internet, where it can then be viewed and analysed on a smartphone or tablet
• a parental protection system for mobile devices in the home. The device ensures that children can stay safe on the internet, regardless of which device they pick up; a mobile phone or a tablet
• a device which allows school children in developing countries to communicate with other schools across the world.

“We had some great entries to choose from and it was encouraging to see groups of students as young as 8 years old getting to grips with programming skills," said Frazer Bennett, a technology expert at PA Consulting Group.

The panel of judges includes: Alan Middleton, CEO of PA Consulting Group; Eben Upton, Founder of Raspberry Pi; Andy Hopper, President of the IET and head of computer technology at Cambridge University; Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC Technology Correspondent; Zillah Bing-Maddick, CEO of Trader Media group and Barak Regev, Cloud platform sales lead at Google.

PA technology experts recently used the Raspberry Pi to shrink a 30 foot mobile phone basestation into the three inch computer.