The current buzz word is big data, well there doesn’t come anymore bigger data, except maybe space, than our environment and everything in it. Well the team at Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture for Catalonia are attempting to monitor, capture and share as much collected data from the environment as they can, with a little help from the crowd.
In a similar style to the SETI@home but utilising an Arduino based platform, the Smart Citizen project is attempting to grow the number of these tiny sensor platforms blinking away listening, sniffing an reporting back about the world about them.
The Arduino platform used by Smart Citizen to gather environment data.
Using the Arduino sensor laden platform, smartphone app, website and API, everyone can start sharing the data around them, well they will shortly. Having exceeded their Kickstarter targets (now extended to develope an Android app) the team are now taking pre-orders for the little data harvesters.
The project is clearly very early days, but there are a growing number of reporting stations, if this number gains momentum then it could well be a consistent data stream that could connect environmental changes over a large region. The platform is seen as just that and so there are expectation to add further sensors and capabilities. Imagine if solar sensors were widespread and reporting data, they could be used to map solar flare impacts.
The three key platforms of the Smart Citizen project.
So the next thing is to get one, or pre-order one for now and add to the blinking data packets announcing the status of the planet to the world.