Exclusive Interview: Tolulope Iroye, Inventor of Magic Box [Photo Included]

Tolulope Iroye, emerged winner of the ‘Best Use of Technology’ at the Future Awards 2011 ceremony held yesterday at the Landmark Event Centre, Victoria Island.

Tolu, 27, is a young Nigerian involved in the design and construction of electronic gadgets, hardware designs, alternative energy solutions, security systems and control system.

He also writes programs for microcontrollers which can be used for any purpose (mini computer), design and construction of solar systems, inverters, automatic change over, voltage stabilizers, intelligent traffic controller, intelligent car park system, intelligent phase selector/change over, power surge protector.

I interviewed Tolu after he received the award for Best Use of Technology at the Future Awards 2011.

In the interview, Tolu shared his passion for technology and for using it to make life easy for people.

He started developing technology solutions as an experiment at a very young age because of how fascinating they were.

Magic Box

Last year, he developed the ‘Magic Box’, a device built to allow you control your electronic gadgets, for example, your TV from anywhere with your mobile phone.

The ‘Magic Box’ also allows one to control electricity or mobilize/immobilize cars from anywhere in the world with the use of a mobile phone.

I asked Tolu if I can control my home electronics from say, Kenya, and he said yes. According to him, as long as I can use my SIM card from anywhere in the world, I can simply send a signal to the box to control my TV, for instance.

No wonder he called it ‘Magic Box’.

When asked if his work has received any external funding, he said that he built the Magic Box with personal funds.

Apparently, Tolu is involved in building solar panels and other electronic gadgets, where he makes money from and funds his other projects like the Magic Box.

Tolu initially developed the first version of the Magic Box in 2002 and since then, the device has gone through several iterations.

Tolu explained that his technology sends signals through the mobile phone to the box using your SIM card.

He showed me a first-hand video of how the Magic Box works. The video demonstrates how a TV can be controlled (turned off and turned on) using a mobile phone that sends signals to the magic box.

My thoughts

It was great seeing how the stuff actually works. Yea, the Magic Box is real.

I think the product can be very useful to our daily lives, especially since we forget to switch off our home and office appliances.

With Magic Box, you can simply send a signal from your mobile phone and it remotely turns off the electricity or your electronics.

This saves energy and averts damage of appliances from power surges.

It’ll be interesting to see if the magic box would be become a commercial success.

Will you buy or use the Magic Box?

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