Hey there everybody!
My name’s Kenneth and I’m based in Galway in the west of Ireland.
I’m keenly interested in the myriad of ways that Internet of things projects can be applied. I grew up with my father as a Network Sys Admin and general electronics affectionado so from an early age I had a love for IT and computing in general.
I’d never wanted to learn to code until I found the Raspberry Pi as it gave me a means to an end to achieve something physical with a device. That’s when it all changed for me and a lot of the barriers I’d made for myself and a love for making came along.
The Pi, using a version of Linux, Raspian, which is based on Debian {which I’d worked with alongside my father} then meant I was able to hit the ground running and really get a kick out of IoT dev boards. I’ve participated in several of the Hackathons in one of Dublin’s colleges, DCU and very much got the bug.
I had a group of friends that had just started a Social Enterprise whereby they had gotten permission to take a brownfield site in the center of Dublin and then construct an 11 x 5 metre geodesic dome, in which they would both have a community space, while also having it be an intensive food producer by having an over head hydroponics system, controlled with IoT devices.
I’d worked out an array of analogue sensors linked to an arduino, which would then feed their data over to a MYSQL database hosted on the raspberry pi. Then there was a website which would interpret and display that database onto a website hosted on the same pi. This then enabled more awareness of the growing space and control through remote intervention through the use of reporting and the likes of relay switches to turn devices on and off.
http://www.thegrowdomeproject.com/
I’d like to learn more about what people are doing and perhaps to see what I could become involved with too {^_^}
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Dream project
Welcome @GenghisAloe ! I’ve heard good things from @Bernard
I can testify the Grow Dome is a dream of many urban farming/vertical farming enthusiasts here in Ghent (BE). Impressive!
Your skills with these devices is pretty valuable to citizen led science projects. Are you involved in any other initiatives at the moment?
Also, when I read IoT, I immediately think of user data. @Alberto just made a session proposal for the OpenVillage festival on ethics and data protection.
Would such a session be relevant for you?
A belated welcome from me too, @genghisaloe. I have two points to make.
First: @damiano is also involved with a startup making aquaponics under a geodesic dome. I already told him it would be quite spectacular to build one as part of our upcoming deployment in Morocco (to be announced, just be patient for a while longer).
Second: where this IoT stuff meets citizen science is in projects like the Smart Citizen Kit, rolled out initially in Amsterdam by the Waag Society. It mostly failed. Citizen data turned to be unreliable. Data quality was too low; specifically, comparability across different data sources was an issue. This is not an ethical issue per se, however.
Hey guys,
The idea of building a geodesic dome in Morocco would be a dream! I guess one of the main things that I’d noticed with off grid use of IoT devices was that until there’s very regular power supply, the cutting out of power meant that the integrity of the database was lost, so the timing was all off. One way around it had been using real time clock modules on the Raspberry Pi, kinda like a CMOS battery on a pc.
I must read up more on what you’ve all been up to, I’m juggling working on a project for the Science Gallery involving an Arduino and VJing at the moment 
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Wow GenghisAloe, salute! I would be super interested to see some of your libraries. We are doing some apartment aquaponics using an NFT system I would assume is a bit similar to you guys. I definitely want to do more with Arduino’s to take data. Do you guys have water composition sensors in the array? I tried to test water quality at the beginning, but soon gave up. I assume our system is pretty stable, because no massive die offs, but alas, I don’t really know know~ haha. Whack stuff about PH meters is they have to be calibrated every so often, as well as all the other types of instruments…
Side note, have you guys looks into any of the vertical hydroponic techniques, I’m thinking of name brands such as Zip Grow towers from the US.
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