We are seeing a lot of advances in the field of edge computing, specially, low power consumption devices capable of running AI models on several types of MCUs, such as the so popular Cortex-xM Series or new ones like the RISC-V GAPs. We are also living in a complex time, a time where our planet is showing some signs of fatigue due, in part, to our constant and increasing need of natural resources. I am engaged in a project driven by affinity towards Jaguars (www.wildedge.info/copy-of-home). Needless to say, my project is a non-profit endeavor. However, as you try to understand the problems and provide solutions, you realize that the problems are endless, including deforestation, air pollution, water contamination, biodiversity loss. All those problems will hit us sooner than later, if you take biodiversity loss as an example you will find out that even the world economic forum has added the item to its risk list published recently. Environment degradation can cause severe conflicts, even wars.
This was a little bit of context on my side. The other part of the context is that associated this community. I associated this community (wrongly) as a Raspberry PI related community, maybe because the raspis I used before were from element14. The last webinar on edgeImpulse and the references to the Arduinos Nanos made me review this site again. To my great pleasure, I saw a lot of topics here that are related with my former words. Circuit protection, PCBs, solar energy, and many more that are useful for tech4nature solutions, including edgeImpuse and other open source and free software I would add like openScad which I use for designing cases for my devices.
I am running the project I described on my profile almost on my own, to make matters worst, I am in Argentina which is a chaotic country with the higher taxation pressure in the world, literally speaking; as you can imagine, I try to maximize my time and resources the more I can and I see this place as a nice place to connect some dots. I won't rewrite what I write on my own site, I think a couple of references will be enough, the same for the things I am about to publish on researchGate.
Take this as the first post of a series of post, links, questions regarding edge technology outside cities, I will talk and relate concepts from here dedicated to edge devices in the wild. As you can imagine, deploying devices in rain forests, jungles and places like those is quite demanding, not only in terms of energy consumption. Communication schemes are complex there too. The lack of infrastructure is notorious and even designing device cases that can resist insects, moisture, heat is something that demands a lot of tries and errors and it is really hard to find standard cases on the market. Customizing cases in low quantities is quite expensive. This is a real example, I needed a USD 15 IP rated case but I needed to add some custom holes. Those little changes meant that a USD 15 case became a USD 215 case! Case companies need to change matrices to customize things and that is really expensive and hard to amortize in small quantities. That is why I pay so much attention to 3D printing, I think about it as the democratization of fabrication at low scale.
So, take this as the start of a long conversation; as you can imagine I won't be able to write often and you will easily find better English writers than me. I prefer to write in English because all the issues I mentioned in the introduction are global, so, I will try my best, excuse my errors and lets get the conversation started.
Stay tuned.