Maker in Town Recap: Tom Collins & his Smart Campus of IoT Sensing  & Perception Testbed

It’s always been a pleasure for us to have many Seekers (a nickname for all our product users) from all over the world visit us in Shenzhen. It’s a long way to come along, get together and we could always get lots of great inputs and feedbacks that help us do better. A huge Thank You to all who have been visiting us. P.S. If you’re planing a trip to Shenzhen, the silicon valley of hardware, don’t hesitate to contact us at branding[at]seeed.cc.

Today, I will share an in-town story of Tom Collins, who has been a Seeeker for 6 years and extremely passionate about our Grove and Wio Link Series! Tom is a full stack developer and consultant analyst at C4IOT focusing on Cloud, IoT, and emergent technologies. He recently started a research role at Aarhus University in Denmark, developing strategies for digital business model development, and exploring service design methods for the adoption of novel technologies in SME’s.

He visited our HQ office and our Community office Chaihuo x.factory during his stay in the city. For our two new products Grove Junior and our upcoming industrial level sensors Grove X, he generously gave a lot of feedbacks and inputs after the demonstration. Another interesting thing that we tried with Tom is to invite him to do a meetup to share with the local community his ongoing project IoT Sensing and Perception Testbed at Aarhus University at Chaihuo x.factory on November 29th.

The project is trying to build up a smart IoT campus with joint efforts from researchers, teachers, business students, and engineer students. For those who couldn’t participate the meetup, I’ll recap a bit for their amazing project.

This project aims to collect environmental datas that will have impacts on the campus’s daily life, such as how many people line up in front of a coffee shop, temperature and sound level of a specific classroom. In order to get as many as possible students get involved in the project, Tom and his team carry out many Co-Creation WorkShops with IoT Methodology to offer a hands-on guided exercise exploring cities and workspaces, to create and ideate solutions inspired by the Internet of Things.

The students are also encouraged to find bugs in the campus, to come out ideas to resolve existing problems based on different spots, and what they are intended to do. The top ideas could be selected to put into a real project into the whole smart campus program with the Particle Mesh and our plug&play Grove sensors. By the time Tom shared at x.factory, it has rolled out up to 20 -50 solutions using the simple deployment system.

One of my favorite quote from Tom is “ The best way to showcase any lab or demo project is to use them in real life.” Really looking forward to more updates of this project.

Last but not least, a huge THANK YOU to Tom, for your time, sharing and support! Hope to have you back in Shenzhen soon.

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