IOT Project in 7 hours, and we Won the Tool-a-thon Challenge

[midhun_vp]

Have you ever put your hands in IOT yet? If not you should, because it's easy and interesting - you would find something interesting happening in real time. Though I did my engineering in Electronics I ended up working in software. And this is the first time I touched an electronic board after many years and the experience was amazing.

Tool-a-thon is a 1 day event that happens in SAP for developers, designers, and everyone else passionate about tools. The challenge is to extend and improve an existing tool or create something new using the equipment from d-shop (e.g. prototyping boards: Arduino + RasberryPI, sensors, etc.). Use them and build a productivity app with an Internet of Things twist.

We were 4 in the team - Upendra Dandwate, Karthikeyan Subramanian, Rahul Intety and me. Whilst engaging in brainstorming multiple ideas came to our mind, and finally we decided to go with a solution for the farmers.

Here's Our Solution:

A greenhouse is a building in which plants are grown. Commercial greenhouses expands across acres with production facilities of vegetables and flowers. The key factors which can be controlled in Greenhouse include temperature, light and shade, and humidity.

In India, the farmers go to each greenhouse to check the temperature and humidity, and controls the foggers to maintain these factors. This process is manual and tedious.

We found a solution to measure the temperature remotely from the greenhouses - the temperature will be send to mobile devices periodically using a Beaglebone mini computer. The Beaglebone records the data received from the temperature sensor and it will be send to HANA database. Finally a Mobile application consume the data present in HANA database to take further action.

Beaglebone Mini Computer

Beaglebone board is capable to send and receive the data. We have programmed the Beaglebone to record the data simultaneously from the temperature sensors connected to it, and send it to HANA database. We thought that this process is nearly impossible without the help of an IOT expert but that was a wrong assumption. We made the Beaglebone talk to HANA DB. We realised that IOT resources in the internet is unlimited.

HANA Database

In HANA we wrote two functions:

1. updateTemperature - to get the data from Beaglebone and updates the database periodically.

2. getTemperature - which is used by the mobile app to get the data.

The communication between mobile and HANA was through a web service exposed from HANA.

Database with temperatures being recorded:

SAPUI5 based Mobile App

It didn't take much time for us to created a simple web application using SAPUI5. Because the UI5 resources in the web is vast. Cordova is the framework used to convert the web application to a hybrid mobile app.

From the mobile app the user could send message, call or even email the farmer to take an action.

We had an idea of remotely controlling the fogger by sending data from mobile to Beaglebone + relay switch, but time didn't permitted us to do it.

Regards,

Midhun VP