🌱 Off the Clock Design Challenge - Introduction

👉 Final blog post

Progress reports:

_ Meshfarmer Ubidots dashboard

_ Automated node-red flow

_ Hardware preparation

_ Box design

_ MQTT broker

What is Off the Clock Design Challenge

Würth Electronics company site is one of my favourite sites when I am looking for  magnetics and similar stuff. Off the Clock Design challenge peeped out one day and I was immediately caught because I like to play 🤷‍♂️. To try something new for fun, to build something even newer and to learn. These are the reasons I applied after a few days. A few days later because I had to figure out an interesting project. The word was Gleanergy.

What does Gleanergy mean? We combine the word glean (meaning to harvest) together with energy, which creates “to harvest energy”, or "Gleanergy". 

So the project which combines Energy harvesting, communication over mesh networks and fun! Würth Electronics Midcom and Linear company developed a few hardware design kits which cover Energy harvesting and communication. Every chosen contender will have to build a project based on design kits DC2321-A and DC2344-A.

D2321-A

DC2344-A

My application project

Simply said to help farmers, mainly small-scale farmers. I believe they are so busy they cannot focus on science in their business. This design concept will cover supervising of important parts of their agricultural fields. Every single plan needs a specific care. Implemented mesh network can easily connect all the data sources in one and to provide a complex look. I believe this is a Smart farming. This design concept of Smart farming does not cover only data mining but to directly perform a needed action as well. As needed action I mean to start or stop watering, to control greenhouse ventilation or heating etc.

What a feeling when I found out I had been chosen 🙏 as a contender for this Design challenge. List of Contenders here.

Received materials and stuff

The box was huge! 

• the development demonstration Gleanergy kit itself
• the book Trilogy of Magnetics
• the book Trilogy of Connectors
• the book ABC of Capacitors
• the book LTSPICE IV Simulator
• the Würth Electronic Midcom catalogue of Capacitors
• the Würth Electronic Midcom catalogue of Electromechanical Components
• the Würth Electronic Midcom catalogue of Passive Components

Books!

I have to mention that about 3 months I have planned to buy the book Trilogy of Magnetics, because I  went through one day and it is great. Now it belongs to me 👍

🌱 Mesh#Farmer

My ideas how to continue

I have to go through a Getting started parts to get familiarised with the kit. My first idea is to find out how to program the Dust processor on the board. From the documentation I have studied I would need either JTAG or Eterna programmer. One possibility is to use only API of the Dust processor and to use another small MCU.

Next step

The very next step is to getting the kit to life ❤️🤖