Sensing in Smart Cities with Open-design Hardware

This project aims open-design hardware prototypes for monitoring the environment using open-design hardware and open source software. The first prototype has a sensor station and a base station. The sensor station is attached to a tree and sends the collected data to the base station which is interconnected to the InterSCity Platform. The project is partnership with the group managed by Prof. Marcos Buckeridge, from Instituto de Biociências – Universidade de São Paulo in the context of the INCT InterSCity.

By now, the units offer:

• Light, Humidity, Temperature, Soil Moisture sensors;
• Measurement of sap flow in plant stem;
• Leaf temperature.

The focus of this project is to take advantage of the Internet of Things in order to design solutions that obtain data from sensors distributed over Smart Cities. The sensors will be attached to trees, send data using the Internet, and integrate a system that will notify specific agents when necessary. Scaling this solutions for a big city like São Paulo can be troublesome bearing in mind 650 thousand trees only on the streets, for example, but this challenge will have a great impact not only to the people’s life but also to the nature itself, indeed.

The team is made of researchers from different institutions:

Instituto de Matemática e Estatística – USP
Antonio Deusany de Carvalho Junior (Contact point)
Victor Seiji Hariki
Prof. Alfredo Goldman
Prof. Fabio Kon

Instituto de Biociências – USP
Janaina Silva
Lauana Oliveira
Tânia Girão Mangolini
Gabriela Marin
Giuliano Locosselli
Prof. Marcos Buckeridge

Escola Politécnica – USP
Max Rosan dos Santos Júnior

Institut Supérieur de l’Electronique et du Numérique (ISEN)
Anne-Camille Le Corre
Oumeima El Isbihani

Hardware and Software

The technical aspects of the Internet of Trees context of this project is presented at the software page of the Internet of Trees project.