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

RE: Arduino Week 2022: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino? (Win an Arduino Board of Your Choice!)

taifur — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 15:59:06 GMT

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.

RE: Arduino Week 2022: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino? (Win an Arduino Board of Your Choice!)

redcharly — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 16:34:31 GMT

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.

RE: Arduino Week 2022: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino? (Win an Arduino Board of Your Choice!)

colporteur — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 17:46:58 GMT

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.

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.

RE: Arduino Week 2022: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino? (Win an Arduino Board of Your Choice!)

fmilburn — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:57:22 GMT

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.

RE: Arduino Week 2022: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino? (Win an Arduino Board of Your Choice!)

dougw — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:01:57 GMT

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.

RE: Arduino Week 2022: How Would You Make a Better World with Arduino? (Win an Arduino Board of Your Choice!)

javagoza — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 20:03:12 GMT

HAPPINESS METER

When I applied to the Design For A Cause Challenge last year I wanted to present a project that I called "Happiness Meter". My little son had another idea about monitoring ventilation in classrooms and we ended up designing the Venttracker that won the first prize.

The "happiness meter" is crying out for a try and I think now is going to be a good time to design and build it.

The pandemic and the war cries are causing a lot of dissatisfaction and frustration in young people. Starting from the principle that what is not measured cannot be well controlled, the happiness meter aims to obtain an indicator that allows to compare the evolution of violent behavior in students over time and between different geographical areas.

The happiness meter would be placed in passing areas of schools and institutes. It would make it possible to anonymously detect changes in students' violent behavior over time.

What does it consist of? It's very simple, it's a disc fixed to the wall or on a fixed pedestal that you can spin or hit. It invites you to spin it, not punch it, but it is able to record the interactions that make it spin and those that hit it by classifying the different types of punches and direction of the punch.

The happiness meter would use an IMU and magnetic sensors to detect hits to the outer disk and/or spins of the outer disk. Using Machine Learning techniques, it would classify the different interactions and could communicate them to the Arduino cloud.