nasisiglat man met dagiti programmer ken inventor a pinoy, kunam man! maipagtangsit!

Young Filipinos show off IT dev’t skills in inventions tilt

First posted 11:09pm (Mla time) Nov 18, 2005
By Alexander Villafania
INQ7.net
http://news.inq7.net/infotech/index.php?index=1&story_id=56988

This year’s National Inventors Week is highlighting talented young student scientists in the hopes of finding new commercial or research and development opportunities for their inventions.

While many of the project entries in the Invention Contests are in the field of biology and industrial development, a few stalwarts are showing off their skills in computer-based innovation built with their creativity and equipment purchased directly from electronic shops.

Given that, these projects built by high school and college students show great promise to become items for commercial and industrial purposes.

One of the projects is the MicronCAM built by University of the Philippines Los Baños Assistant Professor Netzie Bebing. Her creation, which she wants to patent, is a home-built digital camera attached to the eyepiece of an ordinary microscope. The MicronCam can be attached to a television set or a PC using a VGA or USB cable.

The MicronCam can increase the magnification of an ordinary microscope from 20 to 60 times. The device is touted to be an alternative to more expensive stereo-zoom microscopes.

Another project, also by a professor, is a computer server operating system running on a mini-CD. The Eminima enables the use of practically any PC for desktop and Internet use at a fraction of the cost of regular servers. Even a PC with only an old Pentium 2 processor with 32MB of memory and without a hard disk can become a network server.

Rufino Mananghaya, IT Services head of the UPLB Institute of Development Management and Governance, is the developer of Eminima, which runs a Linux flavor called Puppy and has several other desktop and Internet applications that can be alternatives to commercial software. He said the Eminima can be used by schools, offices, or government agencies with small IT budgets.

Several student teams from the De La Salle University are also exhibiting various PC-based technologies. One of these is a mobile water gardening robot that receives orders wirelessly from a web-camera attached to a tall object in a garden. Florence Cifra, one of the developers of the gardening robot, said the webcam follows a color-detection system; depending on the command entered into the PC, the webcam will look into the colors of a particular pot of a plant and send a radio signal to the robot to water it when needed.

Cifra said most of the parts they used for the robot are available in electronic shops. He said that given a chance, the color-detection system can be replaced with visual identification so the robot can distinguish the type of plants that need to be watered.

Another project is a water-level monitoring and control system that uses a computer sound card instead of more expensive analog-to-digital equipment. According to Johann Philip Ignacio, a high school student from the Mindanao State University Integrated Development School, the sound card is a cheap analog-to-digital converter. It’s attached to a metal sensor dipped in water and reads the depth of liquid in a container.

Ignacio said this technology could be used by hydroelectric power plants, oil silos and dams. He also developed the software that reads the water level and says this can be improved by adding SMS alerts or temperature readings of water.

Students from the University of San Carlos Cebu have meanwhile created a low-cost attendance monitoring system that uses stripped-down bar code cards doubling as IDs. The project aims at providing schools with an automated personnel monitoring. Card readers that can be attached near classroom doors are connected to a computer that monitors entry and exit of students or personnel.

Vince Cabrera, one of the project heads, said the card readers also work as power switches for each room – the first student to log in would automatically switch on the lights in the room. The last student to log out will switch them off. “This would allow school administrators to know who are within the school premises and if lights are switched on or off. We’ve used components that can be easily bought off the shelf.”

Other student project entries in the contest include a computer background change detection built by students from St. Louis University in Baguio City; a 3D face modeling and recognition system developed by another group of DLSU students; and an automated guided vehicle that uses infrared and ultrasonic proximity sensors developed by a UPLB student.

These projects, whether proof-of-concept, experimental, or just thesis projects, will hopefully find their way to commercial markets, where they could put the Philippines on the map of world inventors.