Greenhouse Demo Day
Exact Greenhouse (2015) was a seven week project course where students built smart Internet of Things devices to help maintaining living plants located at a rooftop greenhouse. Students developed both software and hardware - using sensors, servo motors and microcontrollers such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
The course was organized in two phases. First, a problem-based learning approach was used to learn about the environment, identify problems and to come up with solutions for improving them. In the second phase, the students worked on projects, making their ideas real. Building the physical prototypes required soldering, sawing, gluing, 3D-printing and drilling. Students also created cloud-based software architectures for displaying web-based, human readable visualizations for the data that was gathered by the physical prototypes.
The outcome of this project illustrated the wide array of possibilities that blending problem- and project-based learning approaches can provide for students and teachers. Overall, the experience did not only teach students about technical aspects that were related to the Internet of Things, but also provided viewpoints on urban sustainability and Green ICT.
A course wrap-up demo day was arranged in the Exactum building on the 9th of June. In the demo day the students demonstrated their project's deliverables to guests, staff, and other students. We got a good turnout with visitors from both academia, industrial partners of the Digile IOT research program and the Helsinki Hacklab.
Thank you everyone and see you on next year's course!
Samu Varjonen, Hanna Mäenpää
Course instructors
LittleBitts
The participants where also able to get their hands on with the little bits [http://www.littlebits.cc]. LittleBits are small, open source, modular electronics components that snap together to form larger circuits. The purpose of littleBits is to provide a system where anyone can build, prototype, and learn about electronics. Each modular component you get is labeled with a single purpose, and as you chain them together with their magnetic links you start to form more complex circuits. If something's not working out, just unhook the magnets that connect each module and start over. In the end, you can control everything ranging from sound to actual moving motors, and it's all powered by either a 9V battery or a power supply.
The Exact Greenhouse Facility
The Exact Greenhouse facility is located on the rooftop terrace of the department. It was originally set up for research on Green ICT to study the possibility of cooling computer servers with unconditioned outside air, while harvesting exhaust heat into a greenhouse during the Finnish winter time [https://wiki.helsinki.fi/display/Exactum5D/Public]. After this research was ended, we converted the facility to serve as an exciting multidisciplinary learning and research “sandbox” that focuses on research and hands-on experimentation with emerging technologies in order to discover and demonstrate the promise of the IoT.
Hacklab cooperation
This course was done in cooperation with Helsinki Hacklab, which is the city’s non-profit organization for hackers [http://helsinki.hacklab.fi/in-english/]. Some of the courses prototypes and final products were assembled at the Hacklab’s workshop in Pitäjänmäki, from weather covers for electronics to plastic containers for plants.
The present cooperation was simultaneously a pilot experiment to map possible need for a well equipped workshop for the Helsinki University students and staff. We’re pleased to tell you that the collaboration worked, and are now calling anyone interested within the faculty to contact us if they are interested in hacking something practical for their projects.
The Hacklab sports facilities for woodworking, metalworking, assembling electronics, 3D-printing, painting, producing circuitry and much more. The members of the lab are helpful and savvy with the available tools, and were of great assistance during the pilot projects.
Don’t hesitate to contact Teemu Roos or Joel Pyykkö (‘at’ cs helsinki fi) if you are interested in further projects that would benefit from the Hacklab facilities.
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