The goal of the project
Smarter communications with Nature. The interconnections between people are designed very well: there are social networks, Wikipedia, mobile, Internet. Now its time to create interconnections between the man and living nature objects: certain bird, animal or fish.
We could see the living nature objects in distance using the web-camera. By monitoring it's live, registering environmental parameters such as temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind velocity and other, we will understand more.
Moreover, we could keep information about every bird, animal, fish in databases. We could compare the information about different objects of live nature and analyze it: we could see how their livelong correlation with registered parameters, visualizing information in graphs, pictures and movies. We could transfer some information to the object using sounds, signs, motions and so on. The endangered species could obtain help from the certain person. Every person will be able to sponsor every certain animal.
Approach
(1) we design input point device (smarter starling house)
(2) we open the web-site with the stream technology to monitor starling’s live in real time where every student taught the course will be able to do his own research work and to connect his own starling house to the system. The illustration of the Project main idea see in picture 1.
Picture 1 - Smarter Starling House Project communication schema
To collect data from sensors, to send information to the computer station and broadcast video streaming in the starling house, an open-source computing platform Arduino based on microprocessors series Atmel AVR is used. It is a printed circuit board, on which there are the chip AVR, input-output connectors and other elements. There are many advantages of this platform compared to other microcontrollers:
First, the cheap cost of Arduino allows the use of many such controllers in the project.
Second, open "source code" makes the project accessible to all interested people and makes it possible to modify and supplement the Arduino different set of extensions, shields (as an example Arduino Ethernet Shield, USB Host Shield and others).
Third, clean and simple C-like code, with the ability to connect many of a standard libraries, provides the programmer with a wide choice of methods for writing a best program code and making it easier to debug.
For further development of the firmware code and to estimate the calculations on a microcontroller the block schema is proposed (see picture 2).
Picture 2 - Schema of interaction of the hardware input part
As it is at the picture, wireless data transmitter module is used in the Project, which is able to transfer data from sensors and from camera in real-time.
In the “Smarter Starling house” Project the Mainframe is one of the key components, it is an information centre of all the system. It is going to store information about the users and the starling-houses devices, technical information about hardware and software, and methods of ornithology research, so that the people could join the Project. The mainframe is able to get information through many input channels and to process huge quantities of it, so it will assure stable functioning of the system even in case of monitoring many starling houses. Considering the DB2 database used for starling-house monitoring, there is a possibility of using it as a vivid example of databases on IBM mainframes. The database contains several tables with all the connections between them justified by the task (just as an idea the data scheme is snow in picture 3).
Picture 3 - Prototype of the infological model database scheme for input data from the Smarter Starling House device
The innovative and social part of the project is to unite people through the website, to organise new communities of people, who create new spots to monitor animals, research the laws of their social behaviour and the influence of outside factors on the animals. The main function of the website will be educative and observational. Also, everyone will be able to monitor their animal.
Staff involved
We are a team of 6 students and 2 teachers:
The nominee is Dr. Elena Smirnova. She is a creator and Director of the IBM Mainframe Center of Excellence in Bauman Moscow State Technical University, opened in 2007, she is a member of the IBM Academic Initiative Program (she was the first teacher in Russia entering the Program in 2006). She carry on two coursed: “Operational system zOS” for 4th year of study students and “Mainframe Architecture” for 6th year of study students in Computer Systems and Networks Department, she is the author of this courses. Her role in the project is organizing management as well as lectures, slides and exercises preparation.
Vadim Madumarov, a 6th year student of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, he is a main ides creator, he made a report “Smarter Starling House” about his scientific work in which the input part of the project has been designed.
Alexander Kostyrko, a 3rd year student of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, made a research about connecting mainframe to other OS (in enclosed file step_project.doc). He is also a holder of an FCE English certificate, doing some of the translations for the project.
Nikita Kochkin, a 4th year student of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, has a good experience in Web programming (PHP and MySQL) and in C++ programming, including in Qt framework for Unix-based system. He is a leader of the web-site creation group.
Nikita Bochkarev, a 3rd year student of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, has a good experience in qt programming (term work) and working with different sensors on many microcontrollers.
Alexander Golovkov, a 3rd year student of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, is a Qt programmer, developed several projects on different platforms (Windows, Linux, Symbian 9.4), worked a lot with Arduino microcontroller.
Ivan Maslov, a 3rd year student of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. He is a member of the the web-site creation group.
Grant
Finally, the "Smarter Starling Project" had $10000 on the "2011 IBM Smarter Planet Innovation Awards program" in the section "Smarter Communications".
Check out the web site of the project
E-learning materials based on this project
