1st Workshop On The Internet Of Things (IOT 2013)

Dr. Antoine Bagula, with the University of Cape Town, is organizing the 1st Workshop On The Internet Of Things (IOT 2013) in October this year. The workshop is held in conjunction SAICSIT 2013 in East London, South Africa. More information is found here:

• 1st Workshop On The Internet Of Things (IOT 2013)

All papers will be published in an abstract booklet that will be distributed at the workshop venue. Extended versions of selected papers will be published, after a rigorous reviewing process, as chapters in a book with ISBN published by UNESCO (pending approval) or papers in an international journal (pending approval).

Dr. Bagula and Dr. Muthoni Masinde worked on a project for combining indigenous knowledge and distributed wireless sensors for weather and drought prediction. Within this work Dr. Masinde created here ITIKI framework, a bridge between IT and indigenous knowledge (IK). See more at the researchers home pages.

Using white space for communication

Today I came across an interesting article how the white space can be used for internet access in rural South Africa. There are trials in Cape Town (Western Cape) by Google.

Now, Microsoft will team up with University of Limpopo and also look into this ( Read the article on ZDNet).

With "white spaces" one implies frequency space that is allocated to some kind of service (TV, Radio, etc.) but not used allocated. Since the space is not used, it can then obviously be "hi-jacked" for other purposes. Such as for example internet communication and relaying of communication.

In our project we have been looking for ways to have a cheap way of communicating from our sensor stations to the central office (and back). We would like to avoid GSM because of them being rather power hungry and expensive. Could this be an option? As indicated in the article, ranges up to 5.4 km can be covered (metric version of 3 miles, one would presume). For example, in Mokwakwaila, we are not far away from a school and it would possibly be an option to install a communication bridge through their channel. It could also be interesting from an educational perspective to have the students use and understand the information on drought, soil moisture and weather prediction. There could be active labs to support this in the schools.

More information on the Cape Town trials are found here.

Values from Mokwakwaila

The first month's, or so, data from our two sensor stations in Mokwakwaila has now been entered into our spread sheets and published on the soil moisture pages. Notice that the data on the pages need some more trimming. There will also be some comments with respect to what the two different sensors display, etc. Many thanks to Ms Nemauluma who collects the data currently.

Rain at reference site

Yesterday we had a good amount of rain pouring down over Linköping, Sweden. So today is a good day to scan the values in the data logger to further test the equipment and check the levels that were recorded. The graph and data set is given on the soil moisture page.

It started to rain in the morning, at some 09.00 and stopped in the afternoon at some 16.00. During this time, the logger recorded 29 tips, i.e., 29 mm of rain.

In Linköping, an extreme value of 35.2 mm was recorded at one of the SMHI's stations (probably at the airforce base in town, some 5 kilometers away from our site). This means that the values are in parity, but further checking should be done, perhaps with a manual rain gauge too.