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A COST-EFFECTIVE CAMERA and sensor system developed by three students from Kilkenny detects when drivers break red lights and sends a photo of their number plate directly to gardaí.
Muireann Greene, Annabel Campion and Faye De Breit of Coláiste Pobail Osraí, a gaelscoil in Kilkenny town, aimed to come up with a deterrent so that drivers think twice about pushing the accelerator when approaching a red light.
Their project is one of 550 exhibits from 225 schools competing for a range of prizes at this year’s BT Young Scientist and Technology event at the RDS in Dublin.
They came up with the idea after they experienced many drivers running red lights on their way to school. The group told The Journal that, sometimes, they had to jump back onto the path to avoid being hit.
Using a ‘raspberry pi’ – a small, single-circuit board computer – as well as a sensor, a small camera and python code, Greene, Campion and De Breit programmed their very own traffic camera for less than €200.
The small computer connects to the traffic light and arms itself, the camera and the sensor once it detects that red light has been turned on. Any car that passes by the sensor when the red light is on will have its image taken.
Green, Campion and De Breit programmed a short code – using information freely available online and using AI – that then stores the image in a database after automatically blurring any faces that may be in the picture.
The image is then immediately sent to a local garda station.
“I live beside a traffic light, opposite the school we went to,” Greene said. “There was a lot of incidents – where we’d even call the police – where people would be speeding, but there was nothing to catch their reg. There was no way of them tracking down.
“It was great when we came up with this because it was a way that we’d be able to catch them,” she added.
The group also conducted a survey of drivers in Kilkenny, finding that a small number of people had admitted to breaking a red light from time to time. Others said they had seen drivers run red lights while they were on the road.
During their research, the group stood beside a set of traffic lights in their local town for an hour and found that two drivers chose to run the red light.
All three plan to keep going with the project, and hope to help in some way towards the planned rollout of red-light cameras later this year. The group said they would ask more drivers about their behaviour, and iron out some technical difficulties.
More than 2,000 projects were submitted to this year’s Young Scientist, seeking a place on the exhibition floor at the RDS in Ballsbridge. Over the next three days, 85 judges will choose projects that will win one of the 200 prizes that are on offer.
Students are aiming to win the €7,500 grand prize of Young Scientist of the Year and other awards in their respective categories.
Members of the public can visit the exhibition from tomorrow and a number of acts will be hosted in the venue until Saturday. The overall winner, and some international awards, will be announced on Friday evening.
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Ryanair passengers are advised to walk briskly for 20 minutes,queue at gate 23,then gate 16 and finally gate 17 where the last will be first.
@Patrick Westman: And don’t forget, if you’re a priority passenger, you can eventually enter the plane after many others and leave your luggage at the back of the aircraft while you’re seated in row 4.
Let’s go Cashless, because there will never be a system failure.
@Anto Gunning: do you purchase your flights with cash??
The usage or not of cash is of absolutely no relevance when the airlines can’t process check ins for your flight due to a system failure.
@William Slevin: that’s all well and good for buying bread and a few vegetables down at the local market. But relying on paper-based processes in a very large and complex multi-national corporation like Ryanair just simply going to fly in this day and age (pun very much intended!).
I have a rather unfond recollection of not too long ago when they made you print out boarding passes on paper. It was highly inefficient, slow and expensive. And inevitably led to much conflict between irate passengers and beleaguered flight crew.
@Kevin Collins: You can’t use your bank card to buy food in some shops at the moment because of this IT outage, so it’s not just about flying. This should be a wake up call for everyone to always have some cash available and not to rely on cash machines because some of those are not working now also. If this was a global terrorist attack on Communications what way would you buy your food?
@Shane Hopeful: well this article is specifically about the impact of the outage on flying, hence my comments. If ATMs are down then I’ll run out of cash soon enough anyway, unless I wish to take the security risk of keeping fat stacks at home. I’ll get by on tinned, dried and frozen food for a week or two so I’d see more benefit to stocking up on those than fistfuls of fivers TBH
There are plenty of issues at Dublin airport and they’re all management related!
Ryanair’s customer care charter to the fore.
‘Our way or the highway’
I think they’d shrink wrap and parachute their passengers if they could still sell them cheese sandwiches and Prosecco.
TFI app dosent work anyday so nothing to see here
They should not arrive early, the airport will be overloaded.
Get down to a tweet from the Ossian bloke of the greens = headed elsewhere for the story
have your say