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AgriPod

2021

About a AgriPod

Aditya Mathur, Ali Kamel and Lucas Hoffman, students from Leicester Grammar School Trust in Leicestershire, have been awarded with The Siemens Digital Decarbonisation Award. Their project ‘AgriPod’ was designed to prevent water contamination for farmers in northern India. The creation followed Aditya’s visit to a relative’s farm in northern India, where he discovered that there was a vast array of potential issues that could be addressed with a technology and data-based solution.

How it works

At the hardware level we decided early on that the device needed to require as little maintenance as possible. With this general principle in mind, we designed the device to run using solar power so that the farmer didn’t have to change the batteries every few days. As mentioned below, we also designed the housing to be weather resistant so that ideally the device could keep running for years without needing replacement or servicing. At the server level we decided to hire and program our own server running a python-flask web server to receive and process the data as well as transmit recommendations. This decision was mostly an economic one.

 Having looked into pricing, considering the scale of our project in the near future, it is far cheaper to simply rent a server and program it ourselves than to pay for cloud computing services such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. For communication, we’ve made two major choices. The first is for communication from the farm to the server. This will be done over 2G cellular networks which will be perfectly appropriate for our purposes since we will only be sending small data packets. Secondly, we decided to use SMS to send recommendations to the farmer. This is because SMS is very widespread in northern India making it a viable option whilst still being very simple and easy to use for the farmer.

Awards

  • Best innovation award at Teen Tech 2021
  • The Siemens Digital Decarbonisation Award.

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