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By Andy Yeh
IoT (Internet of Things) is now ubiquitous in our daily life. Most of us encounter IoT devices/services everyday without knowing about them, but are enjoying the convenience and security such as those controlling and monitoring systems in home automation, security and entertainment. Commercial products such as smart watch, smart phone, smart plugs, smart power board, smart lights, smart TV and speakers etc. are all connected to exchange information and controlled at our commands through intelligent virtual assistants such as Siri (of Apple), Alexa (of Amazon), Cortana (of Microsoft), and of course Google (its virtual assistant has no human name).
At MakerClubQUT, we want to learn more about IoT, not only to use, but also to make and customise IoT applications for any meaningful purposes, creative ideas that improve our daily life experience. Think about it, this is so empowering if we are able to control sensors and create applications easily at our finger tips. Well, this involves, wiring up micro-controller and sensors, code/program the micro-controller, then enjoy information and control devices and environment with our finger tips (e.g., on our smart phones).
Here is an example of IoT application about monitoring the environmental conditions in room KG-B428B (a.k.a. the Makerspace of MakerClubQUT), for a pot of plant. The settings are still preliminary but it works well.
This setup uses ESP32, DHT22 (temperature and humidity sensors, 2 in 1), and a capacitive soil moisture sensor. The data (soil moisture, room temperature and humidity) are sent to an IoT platform (Thingsboard Community Edition) every minute. You can view the live data below, or click on this link to open in another tab/window if it does not load below.
The data collected are useful for scientific investigation. In this platform, alarm mechanism can be set to notify the plant owner when the soil moisture is below some threshold. Similar applications such as fire alarm can be done in this setting when the room temperature is above abnormal level.
The IoT platform (Thingsboard) is installed at my personal server at https://iot.code3d.xyz/. You can view this page to know more about how I setup this Thingsboard. This platform is mainly used by MakerClubQUT, but if you are interested in making your own dashboard and collecting telemetry data, please contact us to inquire how to become a tenant or customer of our IoT platform.
Please leave a comment below and let us know what you think.
Andy :-)
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