An interesting smart home model based on UDOO, an open-source single board computer realized by two AXIOM partners, has received the first prize in the “Technology” category at Jugend Forscht, the biggest science competition in Europe, open to high school students and first-year college students.

It’s worth mentioning that the two authors of the application are just 18 years old, and have used nothing but open-source hardware to realize their project.

Quoting Jens Wetterich, one of the author of the project “we work in three directions. First, we try to improve the usage of solar energy in private households. Second, we are developing a new intelligent domestic automation system and third, we want to improve the communication of households and energy providers (electricity and heating). For the second aspect we need a small server that manages our automation system. […] Our project belongs to the 56 best projects out of 2000 presented in in Bavaria. […]
The visitors and the jury were very interested in the UDOO that we used as small server for our smart home system. Especially the high performance by low energy usage was impressive!”

MyHome, this is the name of the miniaturized board, is a model of self-substaining smart home system, controlled by a mobile app, which has been developed by the two students.

This application shows the potentialities of an open-source hardware solutions like UDOO in the home automation context and the importance of low-energy consumption technology in such environment.