What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
DeCo2
Summary
Our project is based on Carbon Arduino sensor (MQ-7), Wi-Fi module and alarm. Everything will be connected with an Arduino piece. The alarm will start to make sounds at some specific levels of carbon allowing to detect different levels of carbon. With the help of that hardware. We will create an application that collect carbon levels data from the (MQ-7) sensor and uses the Wi-Fi module to send that data over the main server. Then we will demonstrate these data in the form of carbon map which will show the area with high level carbon with red and the low area with green. Therefore, creating a carbon mapping for people to inform them of the consequences the effect of carbon.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We devolved an Arduino device with three main parts:
First the carbon detector sensor (MQ-7 sensor) to detect the carbon levels in the climate, a Wi-Fi module which will send that detected carbon data over the server and then to the application, lastly an alarm.
which will be ringing at specific carbon level with different sound tones which will help with carbon level detraction offline without the need for the application.
That sent data will be collected in an application we have made for creating a map that will uses the date from the Arduino device to demonstrate that data in form of colored map which will divided by 5 mainly colored levels:
Green, blue, yellow, red, and black, ascending from green (400-1000ppm) all the way to black (>40,000 ppm), and ppm is the measure unit of Co2 in the climate. Creating a carbon map.
Then all these demonstrated data will be like an awareness for people about the carbon in their areas.
Our project is important for its way to teach people about the effects of carbon in their climate and make a good awareness for it, its also important due its simplicity and its user-friendly interface that anyone can deal with it.
Our project is addressing this challenge by creating the awareness for the people by a carbon map. What are we hoping with this project is to make people understand the effect of carbon and how its effecting their climate and atmosphere, also we want to help people to know where exactly the carbon is located in their areas and at what levels so they can start to take an action and try to solve this problem. Hoping for a better world for all of us.
How We Developed This Project
As our team is from Egypt, is a place know for its climate and atmosphere pollution especially with carbon due the working factories and the traffic jam so we chose this challenge specifically trying to save our country climate and make awareness there for its people even if its small to help Egypt and all world to solve carbon problem in atmosphere.
Our approach for creating our project was to search and thinking firstly about a solution. then we came up with that carbon mapping solution. We started to search about the tools we will use, hardware coding language and software. So, after all that researching, we choose to use Arduino as our main operator and equipping it with three main parts, Carbon sensor (MQ-7 sensor), Wi-Fi module and alarm. Then we chose Flutter as our main codding language for our project and made a server which the data the was detected from the carbon sensor will be uploaded at the downloaded from the server back to the application and demonstrating it with the carbon map. While working with the code we used Android Studio and Visual Studio as our codding software, also we used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create the app user interface.
Although all our work that have been done, we faced some problems during working, which is responding for the COVID-19 changes, we eliminated real team meetings and real communications which hardened our working as a team at first but shortly we have overcome this problem by using and making online meetings with meeting apps like Zoom and Google meet.
As far as this point, we have achieved our goal of this challenge which is making our project successfully, which is ready to be used and launched.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Our idea is based completely on carbon levels detection in the atmosphere. We had had to search a lot about carbon effects. But after NASA’s searches about space and Earth and documented its researches in their sites it became easier.
We have used:
1- Landsat Look Viewer
- By using Landsat look viewer we have been able to Search for specific Landsat images based on the area of factories, acquisition date, or cloud cover.
- Displaying the map information layers that we will use in the program, configurable with Landsat images.
- Creating a customized image with the collected data from the app and export as a simple graphic file.
2- OCO2_L2_Lite_FP
- Our project is Similar to the OCO2_L2_Lite_FP, because we have been inspired by knowing that The Orbital Carbon Observatory is the first NASA mission designed to collect space-based measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with the accuracy and coverage needed to characterize the processes that control its accumulation in the atmosphere. Our project’s mission is to collect measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beside the factories to avoid any Weather disasters.
3- TROPOMI observations
- It Helped us in creating and gathering information in our Co2 map by knowing atmospheric column average methane, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide observations.
Then we also used other sources to determine the different levels of carbon which is measured with (ppm) unit. And used anther source to gather information about the precautions when dealing with high concentration of carbon.
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
The references we have used:
- https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets?keywords=tropomi&page=1
- https://landsatlook.usgs.gov/
- https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets/OCO2_L2_Lite_FP_9r/summary?keywords=OCO-2
- https://ethanolrfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RFA-CO2-WEB-6-23-15.pdf
- https://www.kane.co.uk/knowledge-centre/what-are-safe-levels-of-co-and-co2-in-rooms