PA Pi Awards 2018 shortlist announced

For the last six years, PA has been working to inspire the next generation of innovators through our Raspberry Pi Awards. This year, we challenged Britain’s inventive young minds to come up with Raspberry Pi-powered tech to save the planet.

The sustainability topic has really resonated with young people, producing our most popular competition to date. More than 100 teams applied for the awards and we received 50 fully-prototyped entries across three age categories – primary school, secondary school and sixth form/college.

Every year we’re amazed by our entrants’ inventiveness. The future of innovation in Britain really is in safe hands with these young people. I very much hope that this competition is a stepping stone for them to a career in technology. I’m really looking forward to meeting the finalists on awards day.”

Rob Lambert PA technology expert and Raspberry Pi Awards champion

With the standard of entries high, the PA judges had a hard time picking a shortlist of three teams per category. The nine most inventive teams will get the chance to present their ideas at the Raspberry Pi Awards day in London, where they’ll meet and inspire industry experts before the winners are chosen.

The ingenious finalists for the 2018 PA Raspberry Pi Awards are:

Primary School

Croydon High School, London

For their Raspberry Pi powered water metre that shows how much water you use every time you turn on a tap.

Ysgol Deganwy, Conwy

For their smart bin that scans barcodes to let people know which compartment to put their rubbish in. It also displays facts about the environmental impact of throwing away each piece of rubbish.

St Mary’s CofE Primary School, West Sussex

For their smart house that pairs to a computer game to educate children about the benefits of turning lights and appliances off when they’re not needed.

Secondary School

Usk Code Club, Newport

For their Raspberry Pi system that tells you if your house is too hot or cold, letting you remotely control your heating.

Kenilworth School and Sixth Form, Warwickshire

For their system that automatically turns street lights on and off so energy is only used when needed.

Tanbridge House School, West Sussex

For their Raspberry Pi powered school bin that uses AI to visually identify rubbish and say whether or not it’s recyclable. The bin then gives points to classes for recycling.

Sixth form/college

Felpham Community College, West Sussex

For their system that shows real-time estimates of pollution caused by planes on a custom website. The data is crowd-sourced from Raspberry Pis connected to aerials that track flights in the area.

Collyer’s Sixth Form College, West Sussex

For their wind- and solar-powered battery charger. The Raspberry Pi lets you know how much energy is being generated and how long it will take for your battery to charge.