Brilliant identical twins Cathal and Aodhán Coffey share a passion for computers, making the finals of a global technology contest, writes Karlin Lillington
IDENTICAL TWINS Cathal and Aodhán Coffey have a lot more in common than appearance. The Naas brothers are both engineering students at NUI Maynooth, with a passion for computers that has led each to become part of finalist teams competing in the world's largest college-level technology competition, Microsoft's Imagine Cup.
Cathal was on the Maynooth team last year that won one of the top prizes in the centrepiece software competition in Seoul, South Korea, in the first year that Ireland competed.
Aodhán, and Maynooth team-mates Brian Byrne and Carl O'Dwyer, have made the cut against hundreds of other teams and will compete in the Embedded Development portion of this year's cup in Paris next month.
They've come up with a way of converting any diesel engine to run on vegetable oil and plan to drive to Paris in a converted car using their converter kit and dashboard computer controls. "We can't wait," says Aodhán. "None of us has ever been to Paris. And I've been hearing all the stories about the Imagine Cup from Cathal."
The chance that both would end up finalists in the competition is, on the face of it, minute. Several hundred students across Ireland registered for the competition, with finalists emerging only after several rounds of judging.
On the other hand, talk to the brothers and you quickly get the sense that there was every likelihood that, where one Coffey brother had ventured, the other would follow, especially if there was a technology challenge involved.
Perhaps the only surprise is that they were not on the same team, but Aodhán only recently shifted to an engineering degree from maths and physics, so he wasn't involved with computers and code writing last year - and he was also working in America for several months. This year, he had initially felt he was too busy - he's had to cover two years of engineering in one - but was persuaded by the merits and challenges of the vegetable oil project.
"He came home from college that night and took out every oil we had in the kitchen to experiment with them," Cathal says. They delight in telling stories about each other.
Not only are they extremely close, but they have had duplicate interests and an obsession with science and technology from childhood. "It was always science and technology from a really young age, and we were always building things," says Cathal, who is finishing a work placement with Microsoft and hopes to spend a few months in its Redmond headquarters.
"Technology was what we were both interested in," agrees Aodhán, and the stories begin again. "At one point Cathal built an electronic door to his bedroom that opened using a keypad."
They both start to laugh. Cathal admits he did - and that one day, he locked himself in and couldn't get out: "The door used an industrial-size magnet, so I couldn't open it. I had to short out the electricity in the house to get out."
That starts more conspiratorial laughter and more stories. "I came home one day and he was sitting in the hall with a computer, controlling the lights in his bedroom," says Aodhán.
Fiddling with computers would have been nothing new in the Coffey household. The twins' father bought the first family PC when the boys were eight; they'd taken it apart and put it back together within a few years. "A few years later, we traded it for 400 computer games on a disk," admits Cathal. "I don't think Dad was very happy," adds Aodhán.
But by the time they were teenagers, they were tinkering with everything. Aodhán wanted to build a full-sized Roman catapult as his secondary school woodwork project, says Cathal, but alarmed schoolteachers rejected that idea. "So he built a coffee table instead."
A coffee table? Isn't that a bit, well, normal? "Well, we also built an arcade game at home," adds Cathal. A metre square and made of wood - wood! - this project was built out of scrap timber sourced by their father and electronic parts they ordered over the internet.
"Aodhán had hinges on the panels by the joysticks so you could lift them and look at the electronics," says Cathal.
After weeks of planning and ordering the materials, they built the machine in a day and a half, and all their friends came over to play games on it, but the brothers say they found the machine far less interesting than the effort of creating it.
Around the same time, a parent's workplace was clearing out some old information technology and the twins were allowed to take whatever they wanted home. "We took seven PCs, four monitors, a box of keyboards and mice," says Cathal. "We salvaged them and made two really good PCs and a web server."
These and several other machines were all installed in the attic, where they used so much electricity and generated so much heat that eventually their parents made them take them out. However, it might also just have been because the boys confess they would get up at all hours of the night and sneak up into the attic - directly over their parents' room - to check how everything was working.
They anticipate working together in the future. "Oh, I definitely don't see separate lives, separate companies," says Cathal. "I definitely want to be together. We'll definitely do something together," adds Aodhán. "He would be the first person I'd go to for advice and with any idea."
Cathal says the highly competitive experience of last year's Imagine Cup with their project designed to help teach sign language, followed by their prize - a three-week intensive entrepreneurial boot camp in Silicon Valley run by BT and Microsoft - has him thinking of setting up his own company.
"I like the idea and I think real innovation happens in small companies."
But first, they have a lot more to do academically. Both love their heavy study programmes at Maynooth - about 35 hours a week of classes and computer lab work, says Aodhán - and they both want to go for doctorates.
"We've always had a joke that we'll only be happy when we come down to breakfast in the morning and say, 'Good morning, Dr Coffey' to each other," says Aodhán. "Maybe 'Prof Coffey'?" adds Cathal to renewed laughter.
