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
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
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 (as it has to do deepsleep to survive on a single battery charge for a few weeks).