The ECO-ARC is a proposed project based in a small town in Cornwall called St Blazey. We worked with a group of Architects from the university to add an Community Archive into the town that would bring in aspects of the ‘Internet of things’ as-well as represent past, present and future aspects of the town.
We developed a free bicycle service that first worked as an improvement to transport as they’re free to use and centrally located within the town. The Eden project is located less than 2 miles away yet St Blazey is un-heard of, incentives are given if you cycle to the Eden project so this aims to increase awareness of the town. Underneath the surface is a network created by these bikes, each bike contains sensors and is able to communicate using the ZigBee protocol and passes environmental data back to the central hub. Within this hub (where you collect/drop the bikes) you are able to see the data visualised above you and all around the room as-well as see your particular journey and contribution when returning your bike.
The prototype contained an Arduino within air quality, light and sound sensors along with an Xbee for communication this was all attached to a bike in our presentation. We had a second Arduino receiving the data using another Xbee module and feeding this into a processing visualisation. For a better look at what a visualisation of the whole journey may look like Phil made this video.