Students from Novi Sad design automatic animal feeder – App featuring food dosage software

An automatic feeder, controlled by an app, through which farmers will be able to control the feeding of cattle, is only one of the innovative solutions designed by faculty and high school student teams from Serbia.

They will compete in the category of the Best High School and Faculty Student Innovation in 2019.

– All members of my team come from smaller places in Vojvodina, and the solution we've developed is related to that. We want to develop an automatic animal feeder, a kind of which already exists in the form of a conveyor belt. Ours will be different in that it will feature software that will automatically ration food based on various parameters, such as the weight, the age, the air temperature and humidity. This will help solve a current problem – the daily growth of the population, accompanied with a lack of food – explains Lazar Potrebic, a student of engineering at the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad.

He says that the business people from the U.S.A. who have recently visited their faculty are very interested in this product and that they would like to invite them to America, but that the team doesn't have enough money for the trip.

The team led by Vladimir Skalaj, their mentor and a teacher at the Mihajlo Pupin vocational secondary school of electrical engineering, will develop the Lora and Lora One signal transmission solutions. Future clients, as he explains, will use it primarily in various fields of communication.

The first training course, “Innovation from the Angles of the Innovator and the Client”, has been organized at the Novi Sad Business Incubator.

Mentors will be trained here for working with high school and faculty students in the upcoming period, when the teams will be preparing for the Best Technological Innovation in 2019 contest. Training courses will soon be organized in Uzice, Nis and Belgrade as well.

In addition to the newly formed Best High School and Faculty Student Innovation category, there's also the Realized Innovations category, in which teams of scientists from universities and development units of small, medium and large enterprises compete.

Teams can apply for this part of the contest by April 30. The final will be organized in September, and the favorites, six of them, will be known in June.

The mentor has the task of training the contestants to be able to develop a functioning system and to then research the market and detect the target groups, further developing their initial solution to fit the target groups' needs in order to realize sales, explains Vojin Senk, a professor at the University of Novi Sad and the coordinator of the Best Innovation in 2019 contest.

This year, there are three times more contestants in the Best High School and Faculty Student Team category, the Business Incubator says.