Smart Bicycles ( Old One - 2017 work )

Note - Did this as a proposal for a company that didn't go ahead, so thought of sharing it now as a use case of IoT. Post our proposal, there was a wave of connected cycle startups ( not that I am saying because of our - means my startup proposal, but a lot of work was done with connected cycle and renting platform ). Now when I look back at it, it was a good-to-have thing but might have worked for cycling enthusiasts and those with costly bicycles. 

Last-mile connectivity is still a problem and a lot of startups are working on it and are working on it. Pedl ( Zoom Car ) was one of the products pretty famous at that time ( they shut down the operation in 2018 ). Most of these startups are E-Bicycle startups like Yulu Or Zypp Electric ( not an e-scooter company but an Electric vehicle as a service company ). There are many other startups. But with connected bicycles, it would have added to the health economy of our country also ( these days, no one wants to walk - one can say that we don't have good roads to walk on and specifically these startups - e-bikes - are there everywhere on the pathways also ). But assume government policies like that in every major startup hub - only cycles allowed or public transport, then we are enforcing a good habit ( focus on the word enforcing and good ). Probably, I will write in detail about the end-mile connectivity startups in my next blog. Till then enjoy a small piece on one of the IoT implementations. 

Connected Cycles - Another use case of IoT

In this busy schedule of 8 am to 5 pm, one thing that people are most worried about is health. With the kind of diet, pressure in the office, and daily busy routine, it's a bit difficult to manage health properly. Where it's a bit more physical to run daily, people prefer cycling, swimming, or some physical gaming activity. When we talk about cycling, most of us from childhood use that as a mode of commuting from our home to school or even to our colleges.

In this new era of technology, with the available resources people are interested to see how they are doing in every particular field how much they are spending on daily household groceries, how many hours they are spending while commuting, or how their car is performing. Similarly, people who do cycling as a hobby would like to see how much effort they are putting in while cycling, how much energy they are burning, and what the last route they took, in fact, they would like to share the same with their fellow cyclist just to see the comparison in the performance.

Proposed Device 

Mountable device A battery / Solar powered power device with AES encryption, built-in GPRS / Bluetooth connectivity for uplink connectivity, an automated lock, and the following sensors. 

1. Accelerometer 
2. GPS 
3. Gyroscope.

Hardware features would have been 

1. Low-power device with battery backup and Solar charging 
2. Uplink - 4G or Bluetooth-based (Bluetooth-based wouldn't have worked for an anti-theft feature or tracking feature ). 
3. A robust - IP67 kind of enclosure 

Data collected by the device from all these sensors is pushed to the connected cycle platform in real time using GPRS or using Bluetooth to the user's mobile phone and from there to the central cloud using 4G/5G (whenever there is activity in the sensor). Once data is received on the server, multiple types of analytics can run on top of the data collected like the amount of calories burnt, performance of the cycle, requirement of service, and usage. The same data is also made available over the Android application for the user along with other relevant data.

Old design - Didn't think of the lock system. 

New designs by startups working in smart bicycle lock space - like ilockit ( image credit to ilockit team )

One question can be why not simply use a mobile phone application to monitor how much distance I have traveled or how many calories I have burned. The answer is simple, yes you can, but with a device fitted to cycle, you can have a lock also and an anti-theft feature. 

Connected bicycle platform 

A connected bicycle platform where data from the devices collected can be stored, analyzed, and displayed. The same platform also exposes REST API following API first methodology (it gives us leverage to develop other applications as well as distribute the data to the users to develop their own dashboard - more user engagement).

Features 

1. User IoT sensor data display - Display of data pushed by the application like real-time position (accurate position with the help of Assisted GPS), average speed, distance traveled, any incident of fall, battery consumption, usage, calories burnt, and requirement of bike servicing. 
2. Cyclist community - Organise and share the cycling event in the community, invite other users, share the experience, share moments, and rent / Exchange cycles. Share real-time weather data, organize events, and meetups, invite non-cyclists to join the network, and share your thoughts. 
3. Cycle insurance, service  Track real-time usage of the cycle, real-time location, prevent theft, and crash alerts, see nearby service centers in the city, arrange pick-up for service, see the latest offers, and buy insurance for your cycle.

NCR Air Pollution - Claming diwali not a contributor to NCR Air pollution problem would be wrong

NCR Air Pollution 

It would really be a stupid point if we claim that Diwali don't contribute to the pollution fiasco and our failure to control pollution. It would be more like giving a excuse of your stupidity by comparing it to the others, but i would also like to emphasis on the selective biasing of the people towards Diwali and all the fuzz around social media. Here is an article which talks about the major reasons contributing to the air pollution  and yes pollution due to fire crackers contribute significantly to this but air pollution start increase post diwali from October 25th  because of change in weather patters. 

People now days are more aware of the fact that air around them is polluted. You can verify this by looking at the increase in the sales number of Indoor Air purifier ( 18-25% increase in sales in winter season ) and that is the reason, people have moved away from burning crackers . Here is article which talk about post-diwali  AQI of 2018 and 2019 which was 642 in 2018 and 368 in 2019. Though this 2 year AQI don't define what will happen next year, but i think people know that this pollution is going to impact their children a lot and they don't want a bad future for their children's. What is needed is a reform on micro-level making people understand the impact of air pollution just like GOI has done for open defecation.

Diwali happened to be a festival during the start of winter season where temperature start decreasing, moisture content start increase and wind speed near the surface of the air decrease ( obvious as there is very little difference between the surface temperature and high altitude temperature ). We have observed this phenomenon in Bangalore while running a experiment. In the day time, the number of PM10 particles count ( 1 hour average - 3 minute sensing ) was lesser as compared to the night time and the reason behind this was ( as mentioned in the previously was presence of air moisture and warm air near the surface ( Bangalore is not too cold even in winters and thus there is some difference between the air near to the surface and air at 1000 meter height ) which is not the case in the NCR region.  I have done similar kind of experiment in Kanpur before Diwali and during Diwali. Below is the graph representing PM2.5 and PM10 values in outskirts of Kanpur in the month of June.

Here is the link to the trail of tweets during my experiment of Air Quality last year in the month of November. I wanted to extend this experiment by deploying more number of static air quality monitor in Kanpur just like Skymet has done now in Delhi i.e. monitoring hyper-local air quality in Delhi and doing analysis along with other factors like Temperature, Humidity and density of vehicles in the vicinity thus reaching a conclusion if peak time impact the air pollution. Here is the link to Skymet android app. This kind of experiment will help the local government to find the sources of pollution and then take measures to reduce it. I am not going to point out possible solution to this problem because i think there are people with far more knowledge and experience but i think, evey individual has to contribute their bit in the fight against the pollution. I have done my bit by saying big NO to crackers from last 3 years and i have plans to do local workshops in Kanpur to raise awareness towards  pollution.


Now coming to the reason behind writing a articles on air pollution all of sudden, one friend of mine asked a very valid question that where all this pollution goes. I have some understanding that heavy particles eventually settle down but what about other gaseous pollutants like NO2, SO2, PM1 and PM2.5? I am raising this question to all the experts out there to help me understand what happen to the produced pollution? Does it literally settle down ? We all know the hole in Ozone layer. I read a really interesting article which discussed in detail about how Particulate matter settle down indoor, but i am not sure if that stand true for outdoor.

Link to a online book for those who want to under particulate material in depth ( no i didn't went through it ).

I am contributing my bit to fight against Air pollution and would request all those who are reading this article to spread awareness about Air pollution at their level. 

Belated Happy Diwali to all. 

Home Automation using Raspberrypi - One of the most interesting application of IOT.

Home Automation using IOT 

Hello friends. Starting a new technical blog series on home automation using IOT (Internet of Things). And this time not something like which i had done a long time back i.e. control a AC appliance(refrigerator) using a SIM900 GPRS module, Arduino UNO and text SMS and later tested the same with HC-05 bluetooth module and an android application. This story started a long time back (almost 3.5 years back), when i started working with Rajeev on a remote basis and we were developing "some" home automation device - something like Wemo Switch from Belkin.  And no wonder, we were able to control the device. I lost the video though or other wise i would have uploaded it here. 

Wemo switch from Belkin

Side View of proposed device

front view of proposed device

How it look in actual

At that point of time, building such thing was more of your passion rather than building a startup out of it. You do a lot of research for sales, hardware and even take stupid decisions (like buy a electric imp device and then loose it somewhere, Rajeev was so angry!!!!). 

But now when you had some hold-on on the hardware, you understand things a bit more, you understand what a product which can be used by general public and users is, you can clearly differentiate the DIY and a "product". So what i am trying to write about here is a DIY project which probably only i will use but yes, i can feel that this will be useful for me. Now question is why am writing a blog on home-automation and why even i am doing this when a lot of people have done this earlier and my answer is "out of curiosity and to apply IOT in day-to-day life and make things easy " I am designing it for myself as i am planning to do some Agriculture / Hydroponics related stuff at my home and in that, i would require some thing like continuous monitoring and remote control and secondly sometime i become too much lazy that after reading a book, i don't want to get-up from the bed and turn the light "OFF".

Company where i presently work do continuous monitoring but that is what i call as "Product" because 100's of people use it on a daily basis and what i am trying to create here is more of my personal usage i.e. it will not be required to handle "x" amount of traffic, i will not write workers queues to manage different jobs, i will not optimise my Mysql performance, i will not use a time series DB, i will not use any kind of load balancing stuff here and not even two layer authentication for API's (yes when you work in a startup with guys like Rajeev - you know some stuff about web-designing also). 

So this time, i would create a small home automation using a combination of 

1. RPI
2. WiFi / Ethernet 
3. Bluetooth
4. A 5V 230 V relay, some other hardware 
5. And an simple web / android application

I will try to go as much as detail in possible (there are many existing home automation projects in net and here is one of the link) and will push code to a  git repository . I will start first with controlling a AC appliance with RPI GPIO and later on i will try to make RPI as a hub and communicate to the other switched via Bluetooth or other communication options. I will try to do this systematically and will keep on adding the information here also.  In-fact i already started coding a bit for web-application and made a small web-page using MDL (Material Design Lite). Although the UI don't seems to be good, but i am working on it and will try to make it more aesthetically pleasing. 

A sample UI for the home automation project using MDL

I will divide this blog into some parts

1. Web-application
2. Hardware
3. Android Application - Will take help of my brother Ravi who is a Android Developer 
4. Complete set-up
5. Introducing bluetooth in the scene for making RPI as hub. 

Indoor Irrigation Project - Technical Blog

Indoor Irrigation Project - Use case of IOT(Internet of Things)

What when you are out of home on a long holiday or if you forgot to plant you trees from a long time and you love doing indoor and outdoor gardening but don’t have time to water  your plants due to busy schedule.At present IOT (Internet of things ) is one of the most interesting topics.Many companies are working on IOT to provide smart gardening solutions and  i can name some of them here. 

1. Greenopia - They are developing smart pots for planting your trees as well as they provide online advice  for planting different trees. Based out of Bangalore, they raised money via crowd-funding and people all across country supported them. 
2. Clickandgrow - Another smart gardening kit like greenopia. 
3. Edyn - Earlier know as SoilIq, i saw their website almost 2.5 years back when their founders were explaining there product in some event and from then they had grown a lot. They provide solar powered solution for smart gardening coupled with their app.  
4. Daisy  - A project hosted on Indiegogo for smart watering of plants. 
5. Plantlink - A wireless soil moisture sensor coupled with a central coordinator for smart watering of plants. 
6. Biptonics -   provide their smart router and cloud to which you can plug you own sensor or provide your own readings and manage your garden from a web-browser. 
7. Botanicals - Smart gardening kit by sparkfun - https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10334
8. Koubachi - A wifi based plant sensor which measure T, RH and Lux , determine the need of the plant and send notification based on them. 
9. Cooking hacks open garden project - They had provided a excellent document on how to use their hardware along with software to make a smart indoor garden using Arduino. 
10. Instructables for Indoor Gardening - A open source platform where people share their ideas and work . This section is devoted to Indoor gardening. 
11. Click and Grow - A project based on Spark wifi module for smart gardening inside your house in a mobile garden. Interesting project. 
12. Groove Ecosystem - A complete grow bed which provide you a indoor garden coupled with LED grow lights and a aquarium, connected via Wifi to a cloud server which provide you, your garden data in real time on a app. App has many features like you can get to know the health of your plants by taking a pic. 
13. Niwaone - A similar kind of project like Groove.

What i am sharing here is a project which i did almost 2 years back on Indoor Gardening based on IOT - Internet of things. Internet of things let you access real time data from anywhere using internet. Data from the environment is sensed by the sensor , provided to the controller. Controller then transfer the same data to the cloud using any communication option like GPRS, Wifi, Bluetooth etc to the cloud server. From cloud server the same data can be published using Android application. 

I did this project  using bluetooth communication. I used open source hardware Arduino,  HC-05 bluetooth module, relay , soil moisture sensor, 16x2 LCD and a dc water pump to water the plant. Below are some of the components which i used. 

And below is the whole set-up which i did.

You can clearly see the LCD displaying the values of moisture of the soil. The readings of the Soil moisture sensor are send to the android application using bluetooth and depending on user , a DC motor can be turned ON or OFF. But this lead to a limitation of user interaction and that is why 2 modes were provided, fully autonomous mode, in which you can set up range, so that is moisture goes below the  range, DC pump will be turned ON automatically. 

Generally when dealing with the smart gardening or IOT based indoor gardening, there are basically 3 parameters which need to be monitored and measured. 

1. Soil Moisture - This need to be calibrated by planting the sensor in dry soil and then measuring the sensor readings and then planting the sensor in wet-soil  .Depending on the readings we can provide water to the plant using a small water pump controlled by the Arduino via relay. 

         Soil moisture sensor à Arduino à Relay à Water Pump.

1. Surrounding Temperature and Humidity - Surrounding T and RH play a major role. These parameters also need to be maintained. For  a DIY purpose DHT22 or DHT11 will work perfectly fine.   
2. Lux  or light intensity  - This can be measure using ISL29023 sensor.

          ISL29023 flux sensor à Arduino à Relay à Florescent lamp.

 Here is a screenshot of the app which was developed by Ravi Kumar who is a friend of mine and a professional Android app developer. I am sharing git repo link for the code used in this project . 
https://github.com/shailendra0408/Indoor-Irrigation-Project-

 Below are 2 videos which demonstrate the working IIP project.