In partnership with HW Academy, Intel launched the Intel® Edison Developer Challenge (an online competition) in the UK earlier this summer. Contestants from around the world—ambitious developers looking to create the next innovative Intel® Edison IoT solution—submitted their entries for projects that combined the Intel® Edison board with sensors, cloud technology and a lot of imagination to build a new working IoT prototype. Online applications closed late September and the winning project was announced December 6, 2016.
And the winner is… UK-based developer, Numaan Chaudhry, was awarded £1000 for his winning IoT prototype, a Robust Remote Solar Monitoring solution.
Numaan’s winning project combined the Intel® Edison board, sensors, IBM Bluemix* cloud platform, and developer know-how to create a solar monitoring solution intended to monitor the health and usage of solar energy systems deployed in some of most rural areas of the world.
Solar power is an inexpensive way to deliver electricity to rural communities not served by an electric grid. However, the maintenance and repair of solar deployment sites in rural areas presents a challenge. Often, there may be no reliable communication (a dependable way to transmit and receive data) between a solar site and a central location (e.g., headquarters of an organization responsible for maintaining and serving those sites).
By developing a robust solution to transmit data from a solar deployment site to a central location, headquarters can promptly be notified of failures and enabled to appropriately determine the root cause of a failure (here, sensor data is sent to a cloud platform for conversion, analysis and pattern recognition).
To learn more and for complete steps on how to build the project, check out the Robust Remote Solar Monitoring Instructables* page here.