It is 4pm Thursday at Telstra’s Gurruwa. After an exploded modem, a new ultrasonic sensor, visits to the robotics room, some soldering and minimal computing our IOT Solution has finally worked! Before you wonder if I am mad let me explain. We are at the Telstra Internet of Things Challenge (28/11-5/12) set up to find ways to create tomorrow’s Smart City with a week to create a connected “thing” that improves city life.
The catch.
We had to use the Tiny Arduino, Cumulocity as the IOT platform and LoRaWAN an exciting new wide area coverage using cheap, low power modems in unlicensed spectrums, like Wi-Fi. No catch really more a pleasure as it turned out.
Our idea – that lightbulb moment….
Did you know food waste makes up 40% of landfill? Well neither did we and frankly it bothered us enough to decide to do something about it. Enter iCompost our idea featuring composting bins with location details and fullness levels with the aim to divert appropriate landfill in to producing excellent compost for inner city trees and edible gardens.
Locals could then use a mobile app and website to search a network of bins with temperature and fullness level sensors to find the closest one where they could deposit food scraps to create saleable compost for CBD gardeners.
Using an accelerant called Bokashi we could hasten the composting process. Companion Edible Gardens could drive compost use in the CBD and could also be IOT enabled for tracking water levels, oxygen levels, PH Levels and Air Pollution.
The Journey
The team consisted of these fine folks:
- me (Rita Arrigo)
- Rashmi Patil – Masters of Technology, B Eng in Electronics and Communications and experience as Software Developer
- Jessica Charlesworth – Civil Engineer and Developer
- Simone Dhillon – Developer
- Henry Niu – Senior Developer
Over the course of the project we learnt a lot about the Arduino – very cool tiny computer, we also studied a Wiki developed by the Telstra IOT team with Todd Essery and David McKechnie and discussed our ideas with other participants and mentors like Mac Harwood from LX Group and developer Steve from Brain Tree who coached us around variable pricing models. We shared with both Binimize and the Bin I.T Team who suggested we should use an additional sensor called the Ultrasonic Sensor. We found this on ebay and it was delivered by Wednesday.
We still needed to program the Arduino, we learnt to use Realterm for serial communication with Arduino and then to send the data to Cumulocity , we then used Postman to make API calls to Cumulocity. Thanks to the brilliant Chris Trewin from Telstra Software Group for the realtime API calls to Cumulocity. And finally thanks to SMSer Jase Sadauskas for the super cool website design and logo.
We launched icompost on TWITTER: @icompostbin and Instagram @icompostbin
Other Teams on the journey
A machine learning environment by Binimize collected data about routes for empty bins and provided discounts to residents who put out full ones. Deloitte Digital developed a device and website with a mashup to a plant database to purchase suitable plants. Thanks!
Rita Arrigo - Humanising AI 