HackForGood 2017 First Prize
Congratulations to Jorge Fabregat, Joaquín Montesinos and especially Javier Ferrando Monsonís, student of Electronic and Automatic Engineering of ETSID, who with his project entitled «Green Light», a mobile application that warns the blind pedestrian with a vibration or a beep it is possible to pass or not at traffic lights, have won the national phase of HackForGood 2017, which in this edition has gathered 1,500 participants from 23 Spanish universities, which have submitted a total of 150 projects.
From an Arduino board and the open data offered by the City of Valencia
Javier Ferrando, a student of Electrical Engineering, explains that Luz Verde «is a mobile application that warns the blind pedestrian with a vibration or a beep if he can pass or not.» As for the origin of the project, Jorge Fabregat, a student of Telecommunication Engineering, comments on how they agreed on the winning idea: «Javi wanted to develop something related to a traffic light for blind people with Bluetooth technology, which has the disadvantage that it forces the user to synchronize manually the phone with each new semaphore that is in. Joaquin then proposed to use the open data offered by the City of Valencia, so we devised a way to unify everything and we came up with the application.
In order to obtain the real-time status of the traffic lights, they used an Arduino board, an open-source, low-cost, easy-to-use and very flexible microcontroller designed for artists, designers, computer novices and anyone interested Create interactive objects or environments.
4 awards and lots of praise
In the contest, Luz Verde has captured a multitude of accolades and awards. Not in vain, in addition to the absolute prize in the global phase, previously had obtained three local awards: Geo-Open Data VLC, Think Big and first place of the headquarters of Valencia.
But the project has not ended here, as their success in the Think Big category of Fundación Telefónica will allow them to continue working on it. In this case, the award consists of a training weekend in social entrepreneurship, the possibility of accessing financing of up to 3,000 euros and the personalized support of a mentor (a volunteer employed by the telephone company).