Rural & Urban Hack(s) Workshops: a Short story
There are many meanings and stories underneath the workshop we hosted during the years 2014-2019 in the field of Rural & Urban farming. For many, they were the first ever IoT workshop they enrolled to, for us a way to explore new scenarios and landscapes, in constant evolution.
These workshop allowed me to mend the more traditional Arduino worshop (8bit Arduino Uno, or Leonardo based) held since I first produced one back in 2008 to a more rounded Internet of Things edition, that became a sort of canovaccio (storytelling outline) to most of my teaching ever since.
It was the time of the introduction of Arduino MKR 1000, ESP8266 was still off the radar, and DIY IoT (IoT) was about to experience the hype we (I’m writing in early 2023) are experiencing for AI.
Reading and reviewing the ideas that were coming out in that period from nowadays perspective is super interesting, and may shed some light for the upcoming years development of other scenarios.
The challenge in teaching microcontrollers and IoT, creating and fast prototyping solutions in a short run (18, 24 hours the logest workshop I held), leaving the students going home with a path to follow, a project to accomplish by themselves, has always taken in account tree different aspects of the conversation: the sensors (or actuators), the Microcontroller and its Communication protocol, the Cloud.
This is where we dive in the cultural and technological aspects on how Open Source Hardware and software evolved, like us. The workshop had various declinations, or chapters. This page reviews the whole glorious Rural Hack Saga, by taking in account the early workshop held in Calvanico, near Salerno, in 2016, using general purposed, or maker oriented tools to shift to industrial agricoltural tools in the early 20ies.
Looking for a Cloud
The very first kit was meant to be hardware agnostic (we often used it with Arduino MKR 1000 or 1010), and breadboard based. The duration of the workshop was 18-20 hours, and most of the time was devoted to understand the correct use of the Soil Moisture Sensor from Lithuaninan Open Hardware producer Catnip Industries as well as sorting out the different (and convenientely absolute) LUX values from Adafruit’s GA1A12S202 Light Sensor.
The problem was indeed where to post the data. Most of the areas of Italy the workshop attendees were coming from were not connected to the internet, so we adapted our sillabus to create local networks, based on unreliable WIFI connections. ZigBee was obviously an option, but at the time it was still hard to integrate in a maker, newbie scenario. Is it today?
It’s been super interesting to join the enthusiast community of Ruralhackers, and make the workshop syllabus evolve and adapt based on their needs throughout the different editions of the workshop, also held as a conference or Q&A.
From Trento’s MUSE workshop to Seeds/Chips Milan conference, we experienced the shiftment from a breadsboard, solder / DIY custom based solution to a more easily replicable one, throughout the use of the Seeedstudio Grove System, together with MKR Grove Shield.
We worked really hard to allow non technical users to negotiate quick & dirty solutions to automatize their processes. In order to do that, we often used services such as OpenEnergyMonitor, IFTT, Blynk, Thingspeak, Telegram, Node-RED.
The more we were teaching and meeting farmers and students, young and enthusiasts around farming, urban farming, automated greenhouses and aquaponics, the more we shifted from the development of the monitoring nodes to the integration of different nodes in a system. The consistent adoption of Node-RED allowed multiple integrations in one simple and elegant toolset
At Officine we are constatntly looking to not reinvent the wheel or created new standards, and we were often asked to delevop or integrate new things. That’s how we discovered and joined Mycodo‘s project and community, held and developed by the incredible Kyle Gabriel. Kyle’s Mushroom Cultivantion project is by far the best documented project we have seen. Ever.
From Hacking to System Integration
The need to shift from WIFI to more resilient and distributed network solutions (like LoRa or Sigfox), or benefit of low power devices, able to stand a season, or even a year without changing the batteries, in wild climate situation made testing and using new solutions a necessity: that’s where SenseCap came in.
The SenseCap family product is addressing specific needs ranging from Agrotech to Meteorological Monitoring or Smart Cities. They have been lately updated to their second interaction and are a resilient hardware to build a monitorng system with.