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  • Author Author: tariq.ahmad
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Arduino Week 2022: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino? (Win an Arduino Board of Your Choice!)

tariq.ahmad

imageIn the Comments Below:  Tell Us the Story: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino!

From Now Until the End of April: We Will Be Giving Away Arduino Boards to Make Inspiring Stories of a Better World a Reality!

imageArduino week is a week long celebration of Arduino.   It gets kicked off on March 21st and ends on March 26th but the celebration of Arduino does not end there on the element14 community.   To celebrate, we will be be having a Better World with Arduino workshop and a companion project competition.  The goal of the competition is to turn inspiration into reality, as the world keeps on pushing higher ground.   At the end of the project competition, we will collect stories from community members along with projects that make a difference in the world, and use them to publish a book that inspires us to use our creativity to Make a Better World. 

In addition to this giveaway,  we will have workshops that feature some of the most exciting new Arduino boards, the Nicla Sense ME and the maker friendly MKR Sense 333.   These boards can be used with a range of applications and open up exciting possibilities such as TinyML, predictive maintenance, environmental monitoring, robotics, sensor fusion, and so much more.   This will be an open ended contest and open to interpretation.   Your project can be altruistic or one that gives joy or laughter to others.   Projects can range from complex to simple and are representative of the diversity of thought and skill of a community celebrated for sharing knowledge and that knows no limits when it comes to creativity.  

Here are some ideas from our members to get you started:

Arduino week is an event that spreads happiness but this year is special for everyone, we have gone from being aware of not getting sick from COVID-19 to fearing "war".

As a father of a family there is something that worries me and that does not let me sleep these days: How could we help the people of Ukraine?

The Arduino Nicla Sense ME board can be used to build many solutions that help improve the living conditions of the people of Ukraine, it could help to classify different types of explosions, air quality patterns, monitor habitability of bomb shelters, underground orientation with dead reckoning.

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This looks a very nice board. Sadly at £50 I think it is too expensive for me. Can we use Nano 33 or MKR boards instead as I already have these?Not entirely sure what I might do, maybe use the motion sensor on a two legged walking robot or maybe on one of these four legged dog like platforms. 

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I think that this would make a great machine controller.  I have a client that builds animatronic displays (Halloween Props).  I am currently working on a project for him to directly control elements of these displays by using realtime motions of an hidden actor(s) as opposed to prerecorded sequences.  I could easily see that the Nicla Sense ME board would make an excellent controller for this application, as well as many other forms of machine (robot) control.

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The Nicla Sense ME board looks great. I would love to try the connection with my Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 and also adapt my environmental monitor to that board, make it portable, reduce power consumption and also monitor physical activity. 

Training a machine learning model well takes a lot of time. I don't know OpenML, but if I have done some projects with Edge Impulse, it will be a good opportunity to learn about OpenML.

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Tell Us Your B.W.A Story & Board Giveaway: March 17- April 30, 2022
Arduino Week March 21-26, 2022
B.W.A Project Competition Launches: March 25, 2022
B.W.A Workshop: Part 1: Getting Started & Nicla Sense ME Giveaway: March 26, 2022
B.W.A Workshop: Part 2: Project Example & Nano Sense 33 Giveaway: April 23, 2022
B.W.A. Competition Closes: May 25, 2022
B.W.A Winners Announced: June 4, 2022
B.W.A. Workshop: Part 3: Inspiring Projects & Win a B.W.A. Hardcover Book: June 4, 2022

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Nano Sense 33 Nicla Sense ME
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In the Comments Below:  Let Us Know How You Would Like to Make a Better World with Arduino!

  • Drinking enough water is very important for our health. Drinking more water can lead to clearer skin, better overall health, improved productivity and brain function, increased energy levels, and even weight loss.

    In our busy lives, it is really hard to remember to drink enough water. And most of the time we forget to drink enough water whether we are at the home, office, or on the go. Around 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated all the time.

    So, in order to build a healthy water drinking habit, it’s important to track your water intake every day.

    For this purpose, I have made a smart water bottle a few years ago. This is the project link: https://www.hackster.io/taifur/arduino-powered-water-bottle-42ee43

    Now, I want to update it with Nicla Sense ME board and want to make it smarter connecting to the internet. I will use the board integrated BLE to connect it to the smartphone app and then the cloud to store and visualized the drinking data. User activity will be monitored using the internal accelerometer and gyroscope. I will add a ToF water level sensor to keep track of the water consumption and the consumption pattern of the user. I will use RGB led to notify user when he/she needs to intake water. Full intake patterns and suggestions will be configured and observed from the smartphone app. 

  • I would like to carry out a project for the control of air quality in school classrooms or, in general, in a closed work environment. The Nicla Sense ME board Arduino seems to me the ideal choice as it does not require many other additional components and has a large number of sensors that can be used for an analysis of air quality, from the feeling of well-being (temperature and humidity) to presence of CO2.

  • WYC, (WARNING YOU’RE COLD LAYER! ) wearable pronounced wickel, is a project to provide early warning to a paraplegic/quadriplegic person that the temperature in the body extremities is at risk point.

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    Paralysis from a spinal cord injury prevents the individual's sensory system from accurately reporting temperature. Extremity temperatures can become critical without the individual knowing. The body's spinal cord collects sensor information and sends it to the brain. If the spinal cord is damaged by a break, sensor information below the break is not available to the brain.

    Let’s assume an individual has suffered a spinal cord injury that isolates 3/4 of their body below the injury. That creates a condition where the brain doesn’t receive temperature information for 3/4 of the body.

    In the wintertime, this can result in hypothermia because by the time the individual registers, I’m cold, their core body temperature may be dangerously low. When the individual's brain recognizes they are cold, a large part of the body may be extremely cold.

    WYC, can also be used to monitor temperature for small children. Infants and babies bundled up to spend time outside with parents. The device provides a temperature monitor and reports for the child's environment.

    A single-point monitor prototype would be developed to answer some questions. What data to collect and what are the ideal monitor points for collection. Then what data analysis is needed and how would you display the results. Assembling a prototype to deliver these first requirements should provide insight into how to proceed in making a wearable.

    Enrico Miglino workshop, first Better World with Arduino Workshop: Part 1: Getting Started (Win a Nicla Sense ME Board!) inspired me. I  lack fully developed programming skills. Enrico's suggestion to just work through the examples was motivation. The details provided in the workshop gave me the confidence I might just get a prototype built. 

    I think A layer of cloths that monitors temperature and provides other possible data would be technology to create a better world with Arduino. If you are still looking for participants and have a Nicla Sense ME Boards available for distribution, I would be interested in joining the initiative.

  • My proposal explores the link between a user's activities and their health using the hardware and libraries provided with the Nicla Sense ME.  It is now possible to make wearable electronics with capabilities that were only possible in a laboratory setting in the not too distant past.  The Nicla Sense ME comes in a small package with the capability to link over BLE to a smartphone and sense environment and user activity.  This could allow a user to continuously measure and record information in three important areas: physical activity, environment, and health of the wearer.  

    Physical Activity: The Nicla Sense ME hardware can accurately measure rotation, acceleration, and position.  The NME SensorActivity class in the provided libraries can analyze user activities such as rest, walking, running, and riding a bicycle.  The datasheet for the Bosch BHP260AP sensor on the board states that additional activities such as weight lifting can be self-learned with AI.

    Environment: There are Nicla Sense ME libraries for measuring temperature, pressure, carbon monoxide, volatile sulfur compounds, and air quality index/VOCs.

    Health: Smartwatches can now measure heart rate, heart irregularities, blood oxygen, and fall detection.  Sensors with similar capabilities can be added to the Nicla Sense ME.

    The activity, environment, and health information can provide medical data in real-time as a user goes about their normal routine.  It can be used to answer questions such as whether their heart irregularity is associated with a certain activity or environment.  It might indicate that exposure to certain environmental conditions aggravates a medical condition, and so on.  By linking to a smartphone emergency information could be relayed to others.

    My proposal is not to develop a medical device/prototype or develop a smartphone App but to explore the potential.  The focus will be on, and largely limited to, the capabilities of the Nicla Sense ME and the provided libraries.

  • I think communications can make a better world for a lot of reasons: Ideas and information can be shared, it fosters learning, social interaction is important, pandemic isolation needs to be reduced, communication keeps us grounded in reality and away from spiraling into paranoia, it builds relationships, and it is fun.

    Children especially need interaction to fully develop, but we also need to keep them safe and not exposed to the nasty side of the internet. I am interested in exploring developing a mobile text-only communicator using an MQTT broker to relay messages.

    Such a system avoids phone plans and unwanted access to the wider internet while promoting communication skills and human interaction instead of video games. Parents could subscribe to the same topics if they want to monitor the traffic.

    I envision something like an "Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect" with a Blackberry style keypad and LCD that is communicating wirelessly through an MQTT broker. Maybe use a Raspberry Pi as the MQTT broker, although an Arduino Portenta can probably serve as a small MQTT broker if it needs to be all Arduino. I'm still in the early phases of figuring out the feasibility of MQTT for this application and what the limits would be, but it is interesting to ponder.