Happy Earth Day from Seeed

Like you and me, many people feel overwhelmed or even paralyzed by the monumental environmental issues that we are facing today. Fortunately, many people are taking actions! And there is a growing community with passionate makers confronting the environmental challenges head-on with hands-on creative solutions — whether it’s an open-source marine litter detective coconut, a city-wide air quality monitoring system, or an art installation reminds seriousness of light pollution.

Open-source software & hardware, DIY, and making have provided a variety of angles and resources for addressing and solving environmental problems. We’re super excited to see the global maker community share their projects and insights on how a hands-on project helps to bring awareness and even provide solutions to a complicated environmental issue. As the Earth Day 2019 is around the corner (April 22nd it is!), I would love to take this opportunity to share some top-viewed environmental-themed projects on Seeed Project Hub. We hope they could inspire you and others in the community to create and make with the purpose of benefiting our beautiful planet!

• “It’s For The Birds!”: An Arduino 101 lets us Reinvent the Future of Eco-monitoring! Come and Seeed how the Grove IoT kit makes it better!

• Arduino UNO Mini-Weather Station: This is the first generation of my Arduino based mini-weather station with Wi-Fi connection, which is able to post data publicly online.

• Fish-O-Matic: Growing vegetables and keeping fish – fully automatic!

• Clean Water AI: Using AI to detect dangerous bacteria and harmful particles in the water.

• Smart Trash Can IoT System: Making Garbage Collection System smart and cloud linked. Thus, helping in optimization of the route for garbage collection; saving fuel.

Low-cost yet advanced technologies, especially the open source hardware & software, enable almost everyone to get involved to show support for environmental protection. Since founded in 2008, Seeed has been putting efforts and resources in supporting environmental projects worldwide. We’re pround to witness them evolving from personal ideas to projects and products embraced by the market.

• Smart Citizen, a project conceived in Fab Lab Barcelona, makes it accessible for all citizens with the tools for action in environmental monitoring and methodologies for community engagement and co-creation. It’s also a great project for citizen science. P.S. the new version of the kit is on pre-order now on Seeed’s online shop Bazaar.

• FarafinaFíyɛnminɛ, the first citizen platform for monitoring ambient air quality in West Africa, strives to build up a network of sensing hardware and monitoring data for citizens. This project was created by a group of passionate makers in Kabakoo, the first open science lab in Bamako, Mali. We are thrilled to be partnering with Kabakoo in embarking this journey with Seeed products such as Wio & Grove series.

Apart from supporting these good-for-environment projects, we’ve launched the Seeed for Earth online contest partnering with Hackster back in April 2018. With the aim to encourage our community to make & share projects that benefit the planet in an open source way, we’ve collected 60+ projects from 140 global innovators. More info about the contest, please visit here.

Last but not least, we opened our third maker space Chaihuo x.factory Hebei in Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei Province. Pollution has been an issue concerning Hebei Province for a long time. Chaihuo x.factory Hebei was put into use in October 2018, with a focus on ecological technology and environmental solutions. We hope to connect global innovation with local industries, to help address local environmental issues and come up with solutions that can be applied local and international.

It’s a pilot run where we try to create more synergies between makers, industry entities, academics, and policy makers, etc., hence build up a solid collaboration that makes impacts. If you’re working on environmental solutions and would love to apply them to Hebei, feel free to contact us at [email protected].

If you already have project ideas in mind but still looking for the components to power up the projects, look no further. Here we’ve selected products specifically for environmental sensing for your reference. To celebrate the upcoming Earth Day 2019, we’re offering a coupon of 10% off for all the products listed, to support the environmental projects you are going to build. Have questions regarding applying open hardware into projects? Welcome to join discussions at Seeed Forum.

About Author