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Final Posters. ADE-MA 2014.

High res @ http://imgur.com/a/4m12e.

#final #poster #ade-ma #sproutwave #olin #babson

Wireless sensor interpreter / decoder.

#graph #kpn #process network #rust #graphviz #434mhz #ism #wireless #sensor #wsn #iot

Source Code

For those of you that our just joining us, please see https://github.com/ade-ma/ for the technical implementation details.

#open source #github #libre #meat

Final Presentation Posters Spring 2014

CPR 1 Spring 2014 - Technical Team - Part 3: Product/Service System

Hey All!

This is Ian! Sorry for the delay getting this written up. Been hard at work on our backend! Without further adieu, here're the remainder of the slides from CPR1!

In order to progress on a complicated and interconnected project, we make explicit assumptions about our system, and attempt to address these assumptions with varying complexity experiments throughout the course of our work. Our relevant assumptions are effectively our conditionals of change - the statements we need to prove in order to be confident in our theory of change. For the product system, these are essentially that our system is exists, is cheap, and and is effective. The existence of our system was addressed in part by experiments last semester. It's pretty cheap. We're running experiments to illustrate its effectiveness at growing various plants from seed.

In addition to stating assumptions, we also framed our work in terms of system requirements for the three main sections of our system, the control code / backend, the user interface, and the physical hardware. Nothing like our backend exists right now, but we have a hopefully maintainable, quite efficient, and totally libre software stack running on tiny computers.

The user interface, upon completion, should be readily scalable to systems of different sizes and configurations, should be intuitive to users of mobile devices, and useful enough to make a farmer weep of joy, rather than weep when hundreds of seedlings die from an unnoticed cold snap.

Our radio processing backend is run on a small form factor computer that can sit undisturbed in a quiet, dry-ish corner of a growing space. It needs to be cheap - with a target COGs of well under a thousand bucks, we can't buy a nice mac pro to run bulky stream processing software. It needs to be beefy enough to get the job done, but at the same time cheap enough to be throwable at a single problem.

The input devices (sensors) and output devices (120VAC wall outlet switches) should be dirt cheap, hard to break, and reliable. Fancy commercially available wifi-enabled products (looking at you, Belkin!) don't fit the bill at all.

Our backend is fundamentally a stream processing engine, just like simulink, labview, or gnuradio, but with radically different design ideas. Despite huge differences in scope and scale, they do share similar constructs - data inputs, data processing segments, and data outputs. We've abbreviated these as 'head,' 'body,' and 'tail.'

In reality, it's much more complicated than this, with some blocks not always fitting smoothly into one category or another, and all sorts of nasty forks and joins.

This software has a tough job to do. It needs to take in noisy analog readings from a radio receiver, massage them into a less-noisy digital bitstream, and parse them into high-abstraction information like a temperature or humidity reading. This information is fed into a set of self-contained control algorithms that in turn feed into a wireless transmitter and remote outlets.

All of this software is useless without the hardware to talk to the real world, and hardware's the expensive part. To get it cheaper, we've turned to China. Below are some of the pieces we've used to prototype, and their approximate prices.

In conclusion, and perhaps the thesis of my capstone work...

Signing off for now!

Ian Daniher

on behalf of ADE-MA

#technical #radio #product-service #cpr

CPR 1 Spring 2014 - Technical Team - Part 2: Comparables and Prior Art

Our team started by forming some basic assumptions concerning existing products that were similar to our own. We assumed that there were already solutions for climate control in indoor areas, and that these products were on the market and currently being used by users such as small farms.

In order for our product to be useful to users, as well as marketable, we assumed that there was room for improvement in current climate control systems. Lastly, we assumed that the improvements that we were making by introducing our product onto the market would influence our target group, the food insecure.

These assumptions were easily tested and proven by phone calling or internet searching various farms in order to ascertain the state of climate control systems in use. Onsite visits to local farms in Massachusetts provided additional information about current systems and what they are used to control on farms. Internet searches also provided information as to the scope of products available on the market which are geared towards climate control.

From our initial research, we discovered that there are lots of current climate control systems currently on the market. Many of these systems have similar characteristics to our product. However, we found that none of the current systems on the market have the same range of capabilities as our system.

Many of the systems have select characteristics that are very similar to our product, but none had all of the features that our product offers. We found that systems on the market include characteristics such as: modular (but not automated), automated (but not wireless), wireless (but not geared towards the farming context of our users), fully functional (but limited space which the system can control), or automated control (but limited number of features that the system can control).

Additionally, most of the systems were not affordable for our users, smaller farms which would eventually lead to feeding the food insecure, our target group. While most of the current climate control systems are in the range of hundreds to a couple thousand dollars, the price point that would make our product affordable for our users is on the order of $100.

Through comparing the many systems on the market, we found that they individually do not cover all the features that are needed in a climate control system, as well as collectively have very limited functionality. Systems are limited in how many different individual features they can support (i.e. a specific number of outlets the system can control), and thus systems have either a size limitation on the indoor space they can control, or a limited number of climatic elements (such as temperature, air humidity, soil moisture, and ambient light) that the system can control.

Current systems are much more expensive than our system, even with their limited functionality. An example system which is on the market right now can be seen below. This system can only control a limited number of outlets (6 in this case), and is selling for the price of $785.

Our product brings something new and useful to the market in that our system combines four main system attributes that have thus far been collectively absent in climate control systems. Our climate control system is:

WIRELESS, AFFORDABLE, MODULAR, EXPANDABLE

Our system can be easily installed as it is wirelessly controlled and thus needs no additional internal electrical wiring (although it does require power from standard 120 volt outlets). Our system can also be easily controlled from off-site locations, due to its wireless capability. Our system is much less expensive than the current systems on the market, in the range of $80-100 which is affordable for smaller farms that our product is aimed towards. Our system is able to integrate some of the technology that is currently being used on farms, such as plug-in products such as heating mats, humidifiers and fans. Our system can also be expanded for use in enclosed spaces of any size. There is effectively no limit to how many outlets our system can individually control, and in the case that a farm expands later on, the system can also be expanded to accommodate for the new space, in that new controllable outlets only need to be added to the system, and our product will still work with them.

CPR 1 Spring 2014 - Technical Team - Part 1: Introduction and Background

Hello!

We are team Massachusetts. I’m Dante. Kelsey, Ian and I will be presenting to you today about our progress thus far this semester..

Our team has been working to address food insecurity in Massachusetts since Fall of 2012. A person is food insecure if they are at risk for malnutrition or starvation. A staggering one in five Boston residents is food insecure, and 11% of MA is at risk, many living in “food deserts” where the only local sources of food are fast food joints and convenience stores. We work with Serving Ourselves Farm, the only organic farm in Boston proper, located on Long Island in Boston Harbour. The majority of the food they grow goes directly to their associated homeless shelter. By working with Catalina, the farm manager at Serving Ourselves, we can directly affect the amount of food that makes it to hungry mouths this year.

We are also in the opportunity identification phase of our plus project, food storage, which is another need we have identified in our users.

We recently spoke to Scott from Silverbrook farm, a 750 acre farm that says %75 of the produce they sell at the Dorchester farmers market is bought with Food Stamps, a great indicator that they are reaching the food insecure. He said that he would buy this system in a heartbeat. With a system like ours, he estimated he could save $100,000 a year. When he sells at low-income farmers markets, like the one in Dorchester, he sells at a loss, and that extra $100,000 could go a long way towards putting food in hungry mouths.

Another farmer at the Dorchester market said something very striking… dead babies.

Farms today take care of their fragile seedlings by employing people to keep vigilant watch over the baby plants and tweak the water, heat, light, and ventilation of the greenhouse. It’s a stressful, time consuming, and labor intensive job.

With our system implemented, all of the sensing of conditions and tweaking of controls is done automatically so that the people that would be otherwise stuck babysitting can do the parts of their jobs they enjoy, working the land. This also allows the farm manager to check on the seedlings from wherever he or she is, be it elsewhere on the farm or from their kitchen table.

In order to make changes as soon as possible, we have implemented some lofty goals. By the end of the semester we want to have functioning prototypes in the field, helping farmers grow their plants, a more fleshed out knowledge of who our user is, and how we can design for them, and a distribution plan.

To better accomplish these goals, we have split our team up in an unconventional way. We’ve split into three teams, rather than six, one for each component. We have a technical team, user team, and business team. Each team has a primary and a secondary component. This cpr we are presenting on our progress in the technical team. We focused on the product/service system, using comparables and prior art to provide context.

At the start of the semester, we hadn’t made much progress on the Customer Needs and Market Segmentation, Value Prop, or Business Model, but now everything is in process. And now to Kelsey for Comparables and Prior Art.

The Last Third

The last third of the semester was a push to the finish line for us. We focused on our Business Plan and Social Benefit Analysis, while also continuing our work on our product. We used our grow box to test the validity of our product while expanding it's functionality.

We used Serving Ourselves Farm's financial records to draft up a framework that we can use in the future to gauge how much of an impact our added production/per cost will make.

Using those numbers and a lot of external research, we drafted up a SROI (Social Return On Investment) framework and estimate to see how much impact we could make with our product.

The conclusions were very preliminary, but brought up some fundamental questions.

We realized, near the end of the semester, that there were a few fundamental assumptions we were making that were not necessarily true.

We were assuming that by increasing the yield of small farms in New England, more food from those farms would reach hungry local mouths. Unfortunately, very few of the farms we were able to contact sold or gave their goods to the food insecure. Most of the small local farms served upper or middle class suburban-type families, not inner-city low-income communities.

Next semester, we will be devoting more time to studying the end user, the food insecure, to see what sorts of products or systems might actually get more nutritious food into their lives.

ADE MA Final 3-Minute Presentation from Fall 2013

Component 2 - Social Benefit Analysis: ADE MA Component Report #3

Component 1 - Business Model: ADE MA, Component Review #3

Intro Slides: ADE MA, Component Review #3, Business Model and Social Benefit Analysis.

It's Alive!

We've been testing our Climate Control System technologies on some basil plants we have growing in our academic center and they've SPROUTED!

The CCS consists of a data-logger (working) that records the temperature and humidity just above the plants, lights, and a watering system. We have a live stream of our data, if you're interested in monitoring our plants with us (itdaniher.com/static/growbox.html). Our lights are manually turned on and off right now, but we hope that we will eventually either have that on a timer or remotely controllable. Our watering system isn't fully operational yet, but consists of an air compressor system that forces water through a tube with small holes. This too should be either on a timer, remote controlled, or reactive to the data taken by the temp/humidity sensor eventually.

More updates on this system after we all come back from break. Happy Thanksgiving!

Our Story Up 'Till Now

ADE (Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship) is unique in undergraduate education in that the projects that we undertake do not begin and end within a semester. This class is more like a firm than a classic undergrad class.

Our team this semester is comprised entirely of students new to ADE and while our project has been in the works for about a year, very little visible progress had been made.

Because of this, we spent a significant portion of time at the beginning of the semester acclimating to the project, the class, and gaining a better understanding of the technology, stakeholders, and other aspects of this project.

The first part of the semester was spent visiting a variety of farms.

These farms ranged widely in budget and capacity as well as sophistication and success.

The problem we are trying to solve is food insecurity, or the risk of being hungry or malnourished. Previously, teams had looked at extending the growing season of local farms further into the fall using greenhouses with passive heat storage, but our partner, Serving Ourselves Farm acquired a greenhouse shortly before this semester, making most of that work moot. Additionally, the previous team had attempted to set up a small greenhouse in the woods behind Olin but due to timing and regulations issues, were unable to do so. The team was unable to dig, and therefore unable to test their passive heat storage system.

After meeting with our contacts at Serving Ourselves and walking through the campus, we came to understand a much more pressing need. This past year 90% of SOS' seedlings died before ever making it into the ground because of poor humidity control in the germination area.

We immediately pivoted, taking this new direction as our goal. This was when we came to our first Component Progress Review.

After this review, we concentrated on existing technologies for propagation and what our solution would look like. We researched and analyzed data and designed and prototyped, and by our second Component Progress Review, we had made serious progress.

Now, we have converted an old storage tent behind Olin into a high-tunnel (plastic-sheet-sided greenhouse alternative) using "pool covering" (i.e. industrial-strength bubble wrap) and are attempting to grow seeds in a covered container while providing light and sensing temperature and humidity.

We are now working on thermodynamic simulations to see how much of an effect our changes to the basic high-tunnel design, a business model to see if we can increase SOS' budget from none to some, and a social benefit analysis using SROI to attempt to quantify the effect our solution will have on the people of Boston.

Stay tuned for updates!