the-stitch-project

This proposal is an original approach to the cool it challenge focusing on device accessibility and agricultural concerns.

Dakar, a typical ever-growing african city, concentrating more that 10% of Senegal’s population in 1% of its territory. The uncontrolled urbanization, unregulated waste management and pollution affect all citizens and raises agricultural, ecological and environmental concerns. In that context, preserving its greens lungs has become a priority for Dakar as well as other growing cities in the world.

How can we better plan and foster agricultural activities as well as raising awareness about ecological issues for this kind of urban areas ?

By building an end-to-end monitoring system leveraging massive collaboration, agricultural data and low-cost data collection devices . This system will be composed of the following elements:

A user-friendly, low-cost sensor device (soil humidity, air temperature, GPS and eventually soil acidity) that can be easily adopted by “green” citizens in urban centers and farmers at the outskirts of those urban centers.

• A data visualization and recommendation engine app (web and mobile) allowing contextualization of data and facilitating decision making process among citizens and farmers regarding agricultural activities (what to grow, when and and where).

The data collected : soil & air conditions: Humidity, Temperature, Acidity is to be presented in real time, on Web & Mobile interfaces.

Pilot Area: The Forester Park of Hann, a threatened floral haven in Dakar.

What was initially a pond at the entrance of the Cape Vert Peninsula was turned into a public garden by french colons and ultimately integrated a Zoo and an ethnobotanical garden. Around the end of the 20th century, the rapid urban growth of the city caught up with the boundaries of the Park, and private interests started to encroach in its territory: commerces, non planned urban buildings started spreading into and around the Park.

Tech Specs of the device:

1. Arduino UNO board: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno
2. Base Shield: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Grove_-_Base_Shield_V1.3
3. GPRS Shield: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/GPRS_Shield_V2.0
4. GPS Sensor: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Grove_-_GPS
5. Soil humidity Sensor: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Grove_-_Moisture_Sensor

CONSTRAINTS:

Availability of Data: the volume of data to be collected & analyzed was not significant enough. Accessibility of the information: Making the data easy to understand for any type of users is the main challenge to address during the 48h Prototyping a real-time data web app was consuming a lot of cloud resources, we had to prototype with dummy data.

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