ALL - IRELAND CHAMPIONS! 

On Friday, Candroid travelled to Birr, Co. Offaly for the ESERO-CEIA CanSat 2014 National Final. We arrived at the County Arms Hotel at 18:30 and began some final testing of our sensors in our rooms. 

At 20:00, all 6 teams met for dinner and speeches. The speeches were extremely interesting and reminded all the teams of how their cans are the baby steps to a bigger picture. 

And so, the team retired - well, tried to. We decided to do some more testing of the can but errors kept being displayed. We stayed up until the early hours of Saturday morning but finally fixed all of the small issues. 

At 9:00 on Saturday morning, we arrived at Birr Castle. We were the sixth and final team to be dropped from the quad copter. Fortunately, all went to plan and our sensors received data. 

At 11:30/12:00, the rocket was unveiled. Each can was placed into a compartment inside the cylinder which would fire each can out at the same time through individual doors. The rocket was launched to a height of 300m and Tayyaba's parachute worked brilliantly. We were the first team to find our can as it did not drift into Birr Town and none of the sensors were broken. 

We spent the next hour finalising our presentation and analysing the data. We made four graphs - Temperature -v- Time, Temperature -v- Altitude, Pressure -v- Time and Humidity -v- Altitude. 

At 14:30, the presentations began. We were the last to present and we were delighted with how it went. The judges' questions were searching but the team managed them well. 

The judges then retired to deliberate and we mixed with the other teams. The other National Finalists included Coláiste Éanna, Dublin, St Paul's CBS, Dublin, Gairmscoil Mhuire, Athenry, Mercy Convent, Galway and Douglas Community School, Cork. They all had fantastic CanSats. Nobody reached the National Final without putting in long hours and a lot of hard work. Congratulations to all of these teams and their teachers as they represented their schools/ provinces really well and should be very proud of their CanSat! 

The competition was extremely tough and at 17:30 one of the judges, Stephanie O'Neill of ESERO Ireland, announced that Crescent College Comprehensive are the NATIONAL WINNERS! We will be representing Ireland in Norway in June in the European Final. 

The team is absolutely thrilled! We would like to thank Eamon Connolly & Brenda Cooper of CEIA, ESERO Ireland, ESA, the judges, our teachers Anne O'Dea & Frank Murphy, ON Semiconductor Ltd and everyone in Crescent! 

We will be on the Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk tomorrow morning (11:15-12:00) so be sure to tune in! 

Onwards and upwards from here! 

By Hugh