As someone who knew when this program started, it was certainly exciting to see it come to fruition. It started with a donation to interested Universities and a training to make sure both staff and students know how to make the best use of the boards.
The first week had to do with Introduction to certain programming concepts, Intel Galileo board, how to use the Grove starter kit and also a bit on accessing the Linux terminal on the Galileo. The model was to introduce a concept and then have the students do some excercise on it. I am not new to programming but even I had things to learn. I certainly didnt know anything about the uint8_t data type. It was a great start to the boards.
On Saturday, we went to Idanre hills. Some serious exercise, I tell you.
Week Two, we were divided into groups of four and told to work together to build a project using the knowledge we had gained in the first week. I was in Group 15, together with Dara Oladapo, Dr. Adetan and Dr. Obe. Together, we came up with the idea to build an Air-Quality and a fire alarm system.
In Nigeria today, there have been several cases of people dieing as a result of carbonmonoixide poisioning . There has also been loss of life and property as a result of fire accidents. Our system tackles these issues by sensing when there is a high level of pollution. It also uses abnormally high temperature readings to detect a fire. Once either condition is detected, the system sends warning sms messages to the User and the Fire service. In the case of Pollution, it automatically takes action by opening the windows to ventilate the room. In the case of fire, the windows remain closed to prevent feeding the fire with oxygen and then the extinguisher (in our prototype, water) is turned on.
We were able to get this work! There was a final competion and we came third. We got to take home Galileos. Yay!
All in all, it exceeded my expectations to be honest. Two weeks in a short period of time and we didnt learn it all but it certainly introduced me to the capabilities of the board. I see a lot of potential, especially in the area of connecting my projects to the internet. I would like to say, thank you Intel and FUTA for making this happen. It is just the beginning!
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| The Intel Edison board. I could only touch, not take home :( |
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| Intel Engineers |
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| The Galileo with a GPRS/GSM shield |
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| Some goodies! |
