Well, 2018 was really busy for SpireDigital & development of the Things Network in Chesterfield.
Firstly, thanks to the great volunteers at SpireDigital along with sponsorship from local IT solutions providers Spire Innovations & Cloud2T, we have a basic network of base stations in place for Chesterfield. Three outdoor-mounted stations are located in Brampton, Holymoorside & Barrow Hill. This is an open access network for all to use - enabling local innovation & supporting new service delivery concepts to progress into pilot.
Now that the core network is in place, we've been busy working together to develop prototype sensor & control systems that can help to improve services in North Derbyshire. In that list are systems for damp homes, vehicle air pollution & community gardens. An example (a PM10 diesel particulates sensor) is shown in the picture. In December, the air pollution prototypes were presented to the Derbyshire Air Quality Working Group & we are hoping to collaborate further with this group in 2019.
We've built a prototype dashboard to enable easy logging & viewing of metrics from our prototype sensors, using hosting from Amazon Web Services in Ireland. This needs some additional development, but is a good way of explaining the benefits of what we are doing.
So, in 2019, we're on a mission to consolidate what we have & launch pilots using the prototypes we've been working on.
This will involve mapping coverage of the LORAWAN radio network & filling in gaps where necessary. It'll also involve packaging our prototype technology for field deployment & working with partners to get them into place doing real monitoring.
If you'd like to get involved, there are three things you can do:
1) Join the Chesterfield Things Network community
2) Be part of the conversation in our #smartchesterfield channel by joining the SpireDigital slack team: apply here
3) Come along to the SpireDigital community meetup - the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 7pm in Monkey Park Works on Chester St.
