These days world is facing a problem of energy crisis, over population, pollution, island heating effect and many others challenging environmental issues. Now its time to save our nature, save our home planet earth. Then how can we achieve this? The best approach is to aware the community, teach our children, by informing them about the change in environmental conditions like rise or fall of temperature and humidity etc by comparing to their nearby locality.
The heat island effect is described as a significant temperature difference between urban areas and surrounding rural areas. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “the annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be 1.8 to 5.4°F (1 to 3°C) warmer than its surroundings. On a clear, calm night, however, the temperature difference can be as much as 22°F (12°C).” ( EPA Heat Island Effect Basic Information page). Increased urban temperatures lead to increased energy consumption and costs for air conditioning, summertime peak energy demand, and air pollution, as well as increased heat-related illness and mortality.[https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/cool-it/]
Temperature and relative humidity sensors are coming down in cost and the ability to network them has been piloted. This provides us with the opportunity to think of new and actionable ways in which these data can help communities prepare for and address the urban heat island effect. We have created project with similar idea below:
Description This project mainly consists of a sensors systems, android app and web app. The sensor system consists of microcontroller interfaced with two sensors namely temperature and humidity. These sensor system are deployed in different locations of a locality and forms a micro network between each other systems and transmits there current status of temperature and humidity and also location to an centralized android device by SMS (Short Messaging Service) with the help of GSM modem interfaced with the microcontroller. We have used SMS service rather than WiFi or any other communication system because SMS service is more reliable and efficient in developing countries. Android device consists of an application which acts as inter mediator between the sensors system and web application. It functions as reception of raw data from sensors systems with their locations and sends these data to the web server. The android phone user who wants to know about the environmental conditions launch the android app and the app automatically shows the current location and the temperature and humidity condition. On the tab named nearby the real time data fed via sensor systems are loaded with the help of web server and with this data the app compares the temperature and humidity with the current location and inform the user with the GUI(Graphical User Interface) and if these data are high then surrounding it suggest the user for natural cooling process, reduction of emission and notifies the user to warn or aware other peoples. In this way as a whole a community can be informed and apply the precautions. On the other way Researchers, governmental and non- governmental organizations and educational institutes can take a lot of advantage with the raw and real time data and can be used for implementing new thoughts to do something from their respective fields.
In the two day hackathon in space apps challenge we build this system and won the title "First Runner-up" and also won the title "Best use of Data" for global challenge. We focused in creating this project from the huge list because we are really concerned for global warming and energy crisis. My country Nepal is facing 12 hours a day load-shedding, temperature rise in cites, over population etc.
To continue our work we haven't sufficient resources and came to know about the public lab and we are posting so that we will be working together for green earth