Community prize for Dutch school/student project "Measure your living environment"

Hi folks,

Today something exciting happened: my project “Measure your living environment” (in Dutch: Meet je Leefomgeving) has been awarded the Golden Droplet prize by our waterboard / water authority. As it marks a great milestone for our project, I wanted to share the news here :smiley:


In a nutshell, the project consists of 60 sensor boxes (well, right now ~10 as we’re rebuilding them to make them much better). These boxes measure lots of attributes: temperature, humidity, pressure, CO2, particulate matter, light, UV, sound level and location. The boxes use LoRaWAN, such that a set of boxes can be distributed among a class of middle school students and they can take them out anywhere in (or around) town to investigate their environment and the impact of what we do to the climate.
For the project, we partner with our municipality, who both supply part of the funds but also propose questions & research topics for our students to investigate. Think of the effect of tiled gardens vs. actual green gardens, measuring the impact of crowded traffic to pollution or the influence of heat pumps on noise levels.
Even better is that due to the nature of TTN, the project isn’t even tied to our home town, but can be expanded to other schools (already cooperating with two neighbouring schools) or even taken two Switzerland (which happened last summer with a couple of students). Moreover, as the only cost is the initial hardware cost, it’s very easy for anyone to join, as we can use the community network.

As a result, our students can explore & understand the world and our impact on climate, as well as contribute to and verify the models used by the municipality for their decision making. Winners all around!

Special thanks to @descartes for being emotional support throughout the adventure and @WaterschapValleiEnVe for supplying additional gateways/coverage to our area such that even more students can measure their home environment :smiley:

Let me know if there are any questions, remarks, ideas, …!

Cheers,
Steven

P.S. this project is the reason I wrote RadioLib’s LoRaWAN drivers… guess how much of an ESP32 lover I am :rofl: (as it has to do deepsleep to survive on a single battery charge for a few weeks).

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Congratulations!

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Well done!

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Nice, well done.

Can you show some details on the project?

On you environmentals do you have automate actions?

And if you have automate action on what thresholds do you act?

Well deserved :clap:

@Johan_Scheepers thank you, and sorry for the delay in getting back to you (happy holidays!).

I’m not sure what kind of details you’d like to see, but I’ll share a few close-ups of the box and some data below, if that’s what you would like to see.

No - we measure outdoors around our home town (or on trips, if that’s what students want to do). I can’t really control the wind or street lights, so all we can do is measure and if it suits we can give a heads-up to the municipality about certain interesting things we see :slight_smile:
But the main goal of the project is for students to learn about & understand their environment, making teaching practical and close to home; the actual outcome of measurements comes second, although we do hope that it will net us interesting things to talk about with other parties!

The top of the box (with some wires removed for surgery, and display removed from its pins to see underlying stuff):

The inside of the box:

The ‘bottom’ of the box with breathing holes (the rest of the box is watertight, so can be mounted outdoors without major problems):

This is Particulate Matter measurement in my room after I soldered for close to half an hour:

These were the CO2 levels at a bunch of locations around town (last year, previous generation boxes, not very reliable data, new boxes ready next month for better measurements):
image

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Nice to see some details around this project.

Looks like a project that can generate a much wider audience than a few Dutch schools. By no means that each step in project like this is not a great victory towards a safer and healthier environment for each of us. Well done.

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