community-monitoring

The environment sensing is a very dificult task, considering the fact that environment evolutes in time and had distributed parameters. So how can the environment be measured? Our Team propposes the implementation of a wireless sensor network to obtain multiple samples of the environment(Temperature and Humidity) in order to obtain a Scalar Field (reconstructing a field from the samples) to represent the evolution of temperature and humidity values and to show the gradient between City and Surroundings (the urban heat island phenomenon).
The node (atomic part of our WSN) will be designed to have a low-cost, the design of the node prototipe consists in a little Li-ion battery, a Solar panel, an Xbee transmiter (using ZigBee protocol) and an PIC (microchip) Microcontroller. The objective of the low-cost characteristic is that an ensambling kit could be purchased by anyone who wants to join the monitoring , from any static location such as homes, offices or mobile locations private cars, public transpor (the advantage of having a ad-hoc and scalable network is that the network does not need a fixed topology). The need of an internet conection to transmit the data to the web server can be resolved by implementing an algorithm that stores the data and when a conection to the WSN or the internet is available transmit it. We believe that if ordinary people can be engaged and interested in the monitoring task and show them how the urban heat emission changes the environment, their electric consumption and gas emissions will be lesser.

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