Environmental Awareness & Protection, and What Can We Do? 5 Environmental Projects to Inspire You

Low-cost advanced technologies, especially the open source hardware & software, enable almost everyone to get involved to show support for environmental protection. Since founded in 2008, Seeed has been putting efforts and resources in supporting environmental projects to contribute to our mother Earth.

To celebrate the Earth Day, partnering with hackster.io, Seeed has launched our first Earth Day contest, to encourage our community to make & share projects that benefit the planet in an open sourced way! And we’re giving away 15 awesome Seeed&Hackster-powered prizes for the top submissions. More info about the contest, please visit here.

If you are still struggling about what to make, here are some projects that Seeed has involved in the past years. Hope they could inspire you.

• A Coconut Monitors Ocean Pollutions
  Marine Litter Detective

As more and more litter ends up in oceans, marine lives are put in danger. In order to detect how litter enters the sea through storm drains and rivers, WWF-Hong Kong, in cooperation with MakerBay, has designed tracking devices (packed in coconuts) to deploy a network of over 100 GPS trackers in the ocean in 2016. The data collected by the devices are transformed by leaflet-powered data visualization into Ocean Litter Real-time Map to stimulate the awareness of ocean protection.

When we got the project proposal from MakerBay, we were really happy to participate and provide electronics parts and technical support for the project. And now, the project is still ongoing with more schools and makers involved.

Learn more here: https://makerbay.github.io/Marine_Litter_Detective/

• A Robot Boat Traces Marine Litter
  Project Protei  

Learn more here: http://www.instructables.com/id/PROTEI007/

•  An Owl Detects City Air Quality

          AirOwl

In 2014, Mrutyunjay Mishra who is an engineer teamed up with German journalist Ulrike Reinhard to make the AirOwl Project happen. They placed sensor kits in different places within the city (the sensor kit contains 9 different sensors including temperature, humidity and air quality etc.) to monitor the environmental data of this city during Kumbh Mela (the largest carnival in India, with more than 20 million people participated), and they shared the data on the web. In this way, people can learn about human activities’ influence on the environment.

For this project, they used Seeed’s #Grove sensors to make the first prototype, and upgraded AirOwl into an affordable DIY personal air quality (Dust SPM 2.5 & 10 micron) monitoring device. It generates real-time dust pollution data and shows it on this open data project website and a free mobile app (Android, iOS) that anyone can download. In 2016, we organized an Environment Monitoring Workshop based on AirOwl Kit in Chaihuo Maker Space.

Learn more here: https://openenvironment.indiaopendata.com/airowl

• A 100-sensor DIY network Collects & Visualizes Realtime Environment Data

         Data Canvas: Sense Your City

All the sensor kits used for the project were provided by Seeed.

Learn more here:https://www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org/event/datacanvas2015/

• An Art Installation Reminds Seriousness of Light Pollution  
  Reflecting the Star

Due to the serious light pollution, stars are invisible to the unassisted eye in cities like New York. In order to remind people of the seriousness of air and light pollution, artist Jon Morris created Reflecting the Stars, an art installation that re-creates constellations on the surface of Hudson River in Manhattan in 2011.

Seeed developed parts of the controllers, sensors and communication modules for this art installation.

Learn more here: http://www.thewindmillfactory.com/stardedication/

After sharing these five projects, which are all dedicated to protect environment around us (Ocean, Air, Light), you might get inspirations for your environmental project. Then jump in our Contest now, and share your projects with the community!