We’re excited to announce that we’re holding a Make-you-own Sensor Workshop in October! It’s been incredible seeing how many people want to contribute to smart cities in Calgary by connecting an air quality sensor at their home!! We put out a call to see how many might be interested in supplying data to a city-wide map of air quality, and were overwhelmed by the result. As we speak, more and more sensors are coming online.
Because there’s been so much interest in placing sensors throughout the city, we decided to open it up to more people. Hence the workshop. If you’d like to play with new hardware (don’t worry, we walk you through it), and contribute to a connected smart city, visit the Smart Cities project ASAP to apply for a spot!
Until then, you can view the sensors that are online now on the site we built: calgary-air.sensorup.com. The Smart Cities site is built on top of SensorUp’s Smart Cities Platform. SensorUp’s role in the smart cities project is to coordinate city-wide volunteers, and also to supply the platform that houses the data and makes it available to the public. The platform is a data exchange platform flexible enough to be used for the IoT in general. It enables application development in IoT and smart cities. It’s built on an international open standard from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Because the standard is open, the data interface and data model are transparent. That means the data in the platform is open-data ready, and can be combined with other sensor data and re-purposed and re-used for other applications. Because the standard is from a third-party, long established, self-governed standards body, the standard is stable and reliable.