Data Saturdays Cape Town 2023

Thank you so much to everyone that attended my session. It was a lot of fun and the audience was great!

Also thank you to the sponsors for making community events like this happen, the organizers and the amazing venue at the University of the Western Cape.

Here’s the slides as promised and also all the links to further learning and also links to our Cape Town MS Developer Community was more tech learning fun.

Home Agri-IoT experiment Part 2 – Composting

The home farm is working well, but time to try and make some improvements. I’m going to try my hand and “Smart” Composting. Going to start with a Bokashi and also some worms with VermiComposting.

More on the home Smart Farm here. Since this talk at DevConf 2023, I’m so happy and also inspired to see so many new home farm smart farmers!

Composting is a given as the soil here in the garden is not great.

Sensors and likely some AI is a given here to mazimize the output of the compost. I’ll post more on how things go and what I’ve learn from the process. It will be a lengthy process to measure the benefits.

Step by step instructions, when I know what I’m doing will follow. 😊

But the progress so far is below in pictures.

Azure Percept – AI on the EDGE

Thank you for everyone that attended the two AI on the Edge talks at MSDUG Johannesburg and Cape Town.

As promised I’m sharing the additional content from the Azure Percept.

https://www.meetup.com/cape-town-ms-dev-user-group/events/287139061/

https://www.meetup.com/johannesburg-ms-dev-user-group/events/287592457/

Some more information about Azure Percent

Learn about Azure Percept 

AZURE.COM page
Product detail pages
Pre-built AI models
Azure Percept – YouTube

Purchase Azure Percept
Available to our customers – Build your Azure Percept
    

Product Launch
Roanne Sones & Moe Tanabian Presentation from Ignite
MyIgnite – New innovations to bring AI to the edge (microsoft.com)

Announcement blog

Architecture and Technology

Technical Overview of Azure Percept with Microsoft Mechanics by George Moore 
Build & Deploy to edge AI devices in minutes

Azure Percept enables simple AI and computing on the edge: Check out the blog here

Audio Demo:

How to easily set up and use audio Edge AI with Azure Percept – YouTube

AI Models:

AI models supported by Azure Percept DK (microsoft.com)

Getting started with Advanced Development on the Percept DK via Jupyter Lab and Azure Machine Learning: Access here

Industry Use Cases and Community Projects

Internet of Things – Microsoft Tech Community

Azure Percept showing Edge Computing and AI in the Agriculture Summit keynote by Jason Zander – YouTube

Using Azure Percept to build the next Smart Building

BlueGranite’s Smart City Solution

Building the next smart city with Azure Percept

Industrial IoT and Preventive Maintenance

Technology for Ranching | upperyellowstone and Smart Video Cameras | upperyellowstone

Set up your own end-to-end package delivery monitoring AI application on the edge with Azure Percept

Live simulation of Azure Percept from Alaska Airlines: Azure Percept dev kit to detect airplanes and baggage trucks on an airport runway.

Using Azure Percept to build an Aircraft Part Checker

Azure Percept Audio – Home Automation with Azure Functions, Azure IoT Hub and Raspberry Pi

Face your fears, learn new stuff, and push out on the edges with Azure Percept

Perceptmobile: Azure Percept Obstacle Avoidance LEGO Car

Outdoor Irrigation

For this outdoor farm to be truely sustainable I decided to water it with rain water tanks and have it self powered by the sun with solar panels.

Eco Rain water tank and solar panel
Starting the sustainable solar powered watering system
Irrigation piping and fittings
Installing microjet sprayers in planters
Microjet sprinkler
Prototyping the solution using ESP32 and .NET Nanoframework
Testing Solar Panel and controller

The Outdoor IoT Farm Begins

It’s time to start moving the indoor IoT Farm to being an outdoor IoT farm. The idea I have is to do some experimentation and research into creating automated constrained space farms. I’m going to turn this into a hands on hack series for the CPTMSDUG user group and also share the learnings. Hopefully it goes well. 😁

Today was the big shopping day to get everything I need.

Shopping at the nursery with the much needed coffee.
Some nice wooden planters from the Pole Yard.
Preparing the soil
The offerzen Basil that was grown at a hack event was planted
Getting there
The first evening of the indoor crop being outdoors
New crops added to the indoor IoT Grow station

Sonoff RF Bridge 433 – Tasmota

Sonoff RF Bridges are great to take every day houshold remotes, alarm systems, passive IR seasons etc , and pass the codes they transmit via MQTT messages.

These bridges can also be flashed with the Tasmota open-source firmware used for Home Automation.

Sonoff 433 Mhz Bridge
Serial Port on the 433 Mhz Bridge
Flashing with a Raspberry Pi

Follow the instructues in this post to flash with the Tasmota Firmware (using the TX, RX, VDD, GND configuration pins) above: https://explorationspace.co.za/2020/12/10/flashing-sonoff-devices-with-tasmota/