Smart City plugin is a small, cost effective and easily installable plugin to make city infrastructure IoT enabled.

Infrastructure capable of monitoring and finding bottleneck information in its surroundings supports “SMART CITY” vision of Government of India.

Digitally stored information about city infrastructure to support “DIGITAL INDIA” initiative of Government of India.

Smart City Plugin has a small form factor and can be attached to any container/surface without major changes making it easy plugin solution.

Smart City Plugin will help in monitoring following infrastructure in cities:

City:

1. Garbage collection issues in cities

2. Sewage Management in cities

3. Warehouse management

Societies:

1. Water management in societies

Homes:

1. Smart groceries management

This plugin uses sensing and inbuilt wi-fi capabilities of the Edison board to connect to cloud.

Smart City plugin is cloud enabled solution which helps in remote monitoring, alerting and decision making. Smart City Plugin android app helps in mobile monitoring and alerting on-the-go.

Step 1: Board Setup

This is a simple DIY project that can help anyone with kick starting learning with Intel Edison board.

You need an Intel Edison chip along with Arduino expansion board for sensor interface and cloud connectivity.

For details on how to setup your Edison board check out this blog

After physical setup, flashing and software installations are done you are ready for hands on with your Edison.

Next step for Smart City Plugin is to connect sensors and configure Edison for data publishing to cloud.

Check step 3 for details on sensor integration and network connectivity....

Step 2: Hardware and Softwares Used

Hardware and sensor's used:

1. Intel Edison board.

2. Ultrasonic sensor (HC-SR04)

Software/Tools used:

1. Node.js (Intel XDK IDE) for Cloud connectivity

2. Arduino IDE for sensor detection

3. Eclipse IDE for Android application development

4. IBM Bluemix PaaS cloud

5. MQTT protocol for communication

6. Express, jQuery, Rickshaw for visualization

Step 3: Sensor Integration

Sensor Integration:

Smart City Plugin uses Ultrasonic sensor (HC-SR04) for level detection.

This sensor can be used on variety of materials for sensing the levels such as water, solid waste, grains, etc.

You can buy this sensor at Amazon

This sensor has a Trigger pin and Echo pin along with VCC and Ground pins.

You need to make Trigger pin high which generates a sound wave and check Echo pin for the sound wave echoed back from surface. The time between Trigger pin High and Eco Pin high is used for calculating the distance.

We've used Arduino library function pulseIn() for getting the level details.

You need to flash the sensor integration code using Arduino IDE.

Code snippet for Sensor integration:

//Trigger the ultrasonic sensor to send pulse
digitalWrite(box->trig, LOW);

delayMicroseconds(2);

digitalWrite(box->trig, HIGH);

delayMicroseconds(10); digitalWrite(box->trig, LOW);

//after getting echo record the time for which echo pin was high

duration = pulseIn(box->echo, HIGH);

// convert the time into a distance cm = microsecondsToCentimeters(duration);

:
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Github link for Sensor integration code:

Edison sensor+MQTT client: https://github.com/samelamit/SmartCity_EdisonCode

SmartCity_EdisonCode-master.zip
Download

Step 4: Cloud Connectivity

Smart City Plugin uses MQTT protocol to connect Intel Edison board to the cloud based MQTT broker.

We have used node.js code for MQTT connectivity.

We had to include code for sending Arduino sensor data to node.js module for Publishing it to MQTT broker.

GPIO pin 6 and 7 were used for indicating mode.js about sensor data availability.

Node.js module then reads the data from a file and publishes it to MQTT broker.

We've IBM Bluemix cloud as MQTT broker for which we need to register the device on IBM Bluemix and get the Organization Id, Device ID and Topic information for the Intel Edison board.

Complete code for Cloud connectivity an be found here (Refer EdisonBlueMixNode.xdk)

We used Intel XDK for flashing node.js code to Intel Edison.

Thus we have used both Arduino IDE (for Sensor integration) and Intel XDK IDE (for Cloud connectivity).

Both the binary files reside on Edison board in different folders and thus work without issue.