Hello all, in this blog 2 we will go through the required components and connection diagram.
I came to my native for some work and there was a sudden lockdown, luckily I had my nano with me and some limited components. I ordered the rest of the components but due to lockdown and covid-19, none of them reached. So since I didn't get the mic I'm dropping the audio detection mechanism and moving on to motion detection. I planned to pivot from the agro probe to different projects due to lack of resources but planned to stay with agriculture as it the next major thing we need to address after the pandemic. Also, the scalability of the project will be easier compared to covid 19 related medical devices as getting the certifications for medical devices is very difficult compared to agricultural IoT devices. Since it's a question of life and death its better medical devices get manufactured by certified companies through well-developed research.
So here's a slight change of plan we will be using Arduino nano IoT 33's builtin IMU LSM6 to observe the things that happen in and around like deforestation which is the major cause for climate change and these IMUs are capable of picking even slight vibration from the movement of animals like elephant etc. The encroachment of human beings into the wildlife is causing major problems like man-animal conflict leading to the loss of lives and reserved forest.
So the current goal is to use these smart probes in sensitive locations where there is a chance of encroachment, deforestation, man-animal conflict, etc. so the ideal location would be the land border where the forest begins or shares a border with agricultural lands.
Humans are slowly encroaching on the entire planet, robbing poor animals of their right to live. This behavior of humans destroying forests in the name of development has far-reaching consequences, such as animal-human conflicts in which animals in search of food invade humans' usual habitat, causing damage to crops, cattle, and even people. This is a serious problem in some parts of the country.
Between 2015 and 2018, the human-elephant conflict resulted in 1,713 human deaths and 373 elephant deaths due to non-natural causes such as electrocution and poaching. Experts believe that a number of factors, including habitat disturbance and urbanization, may be contributing to the alarming increase in unnatural human and animal deaths. This is an example from India, but it is applicable to other countries such as Africa.
Required components:
- Arduino Nano IoT 33
- Li-ion Battery
- Aluminum rods for DIY soil hygrometer
- TP4056 battery charger
- Perf board for assembling components
- 5V solar panel for powering the module [Extracted from a solar lantern
] - Plastic Jar for the casing [No access to 3d printer
] - Passives for soil hygrometer
Connection diagram:
Since I could not source the MEMS microphone and battery charger [as things didn't go as planned] I'm using the one present in the quick logic's quick feather board. Rest of the components are either DIY or extracted from other household resources.
Block diagram of connections:
Simple block diagram of the system
We are keeping it as minimal as possible. We engineers generally think in our way by adding multiple sensors for having many features making the system more complex. But if our goal can be achieved by using minimal hardware and intelligent software that's the best. Also later I realized that the use of microphone data for this purpose might not be a good idea as a forest can get very noisy and classifying for the sound of each animal would be very difficult. Hence my new solution i.e use of the 6 axis IMU which is inbuilt onto the Arduino Nano IoT 33 Board.
Later this data can be sent over to the nearest network devices such as a gateway. For a longer range, we can use LoRa modules and transmit the data and then upload it to the cloud via LoRa gateway.