Impact Summit Recap
If you weren’t lucky enough to attend Impact Summit, we put together a recap of every session so you can see what you missed.
Hackster’s Impact Summit event ended on Wednesday, October 12th and it was quite the show. If you weren’t lucky enough to attend, we put together a recap of every session so you can see what you missed.
The Industry of Conservation
Speaker: Sarah Maston
Sarah Maston’s keynote address kicked things off and beautifully highlighted the mission of the Impact Summit. Maston described the ways in which Project 15 from Microsoft aims to help the world — growing from a simple idea to apply a school safety solution to help elephants to a multi-discipline multi-generational ecosystem. Project 15’s goal is to enable any conservation technologist with tools like the Project 15 Open Platform to close the technological skill gap and take advantage of IoT systems to further their cause and come together with other partners to drive impact in the Industry of Conservation.
Connecting the Dots: A Discussion on Private and Public Partnership and Driving Impact for our World
Speakers: Sarah Maston, Eric Pan, Yoko Watanabe, Stephanie O’Donnell, and Gautam Shah
Even the most widely accepted and altruistic of causes must contend with the reality of funding and scale. Landing globally scalable and repeatable solutions for the Earth requires money and that money must come from somewhere and foster sustainable business models. In this session, our panel of experts discuss how success is driven by the private and public sector coming together. Each expert double clicking into their domain and how working together starts to close the gaps of end-to-end solutioning we will need to reverse course on climate change. The discussion explores the challenges of funding and helping developers find entry ways to get started in their journey contributing to sustainability and conservation solutions.
Using Coral for Environmental Use Cases
Speaker: Bill Luan
Google’s Coral platform is a powerful set of tools meant for AI applications deployed at the edge. Google just announced a new development board called the Coral Dev Board Micro, which contains a powerful NXP MCU and a Coral Edge Tensor processing unit (TPU). Luan demonstrated how this new board has environmental use cases with its ability to process sensor data through machine learning.
Carbon Removal Tech through Open Hardware: Accelerating Climate Progress through Public Awareness and Open Innovation
Speaker: Dahl Winters
We’ve all heard that carbon emissions have a major impact on the environment and that we need to reduce those emissions, but what do we do with the carbon already in the air? Dahl Winters is the CEO of TerraNexum, a company dedicated to carbon removal and awareness. TerraNexum developed a microscale carbon removal device with the support of the OpenAir Collective and certification from OSHWA (Open Source Hardware Association). Winters explained how that device works and how similar devices work at larger scales to remove CO2 from the air.
Community Spotlight
Speakers: Rex St. John, Markus Leutwyler, Peter Ma, Jeremy Losaw, and Muhammad Afzal
This session explored sustainability projects from members of the Hackster community. Those projects include a CO2 sensor for classrooms, a sensor mapping platform, and affordable IoT agricultural monitoring. These projects showcase the talent within our community and the value of open hardware development.
Hangout & Nerdout
Speakers: Jinger Zeng, Alex Glow, David Groom, Ruanak Singh, Alvaro Prieto, and Olya Irzak
Hackster’s Alex Glow hosts a weekly show in which she interviews guests who do interesting work in our industry and this session followed a similar format. Alongside Glow, Hackster’s Jinger Zeng and Make:’s David Groom talked to experts Ruanak Singh, Alvaro Prieto, and Olya Irzak about their Impact initiatives. Prieto’s work at Sofar Ocean provides valuable data through a network of ocean sensors, Irzak’s Frost Methane Labs provides technological resources for methane mitigation, and Singh invented devices for several good causes, including fighting illegal sand mining.
Using AzureRTOS for Multi-Tasking in Arduino!
Speakers: Jen Fox, Liya Du, and Mollie Munoz
Microsoft’s Azure platform is very broad and encompasses many different technologies, including IoT under Azure Sphere. But you don’t need proprietary Azure hardware to take advantage of AzureRTOS, which is an embedded development suite optimized for IoT. As Fox, Du, and Munoz explain in this session, AzureRTOS is available as an Arduino library that can run on popular microcontroller development boards like the Seeed Wio Terminal and Arduino Nano 33 IoT.
Winner Announcement: IoT into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022
Speakers: Ye Seong Shin, Bastiaan den Braber
Hackster hosts many contests throughout the year and the IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022 challenged participants to development systems for ecological improvement. The grand prize winners were Mithun Das and Sashrika Das for their device that provides early detection of harmful algae blooms. Other winners included Kutluhan Aktar for their AI tree disease identifier, Richard Wright’s for his penguin counter, and Salman Faris and Muhammed Zain for their wild fire prediction device.
Ribbit Network: Building an Open Source IoT, Greenhouse Gas Sensor for Climate
Speakers: Keenan Johnson
Not only does the Ribbit Network have a really neat name, it is also important. It is a global network of CO2 sensors that yield data valuable for everything from climate science to emissions mitigation. But the success of Ribbit Network depends on the amount of data available. To expand the network, Keenan Johnson explained how attendees could build their own Frog sensors using a Raspberry Pi single-board computer and balena (a cloud-based IoT technology stack). By building a Frog sensor, you can become a citizen scientist and contribute to the Ribbit Network.
Crossing the Chasm: A Discussion on Scaling Sustainable Practices and Strategies to Lead Impact in Organizations
Speakers: Jessica Tangeman, Fran Baker, Joe Simon, Leo Banchik, Thomas Soederholm, Calum Handforth
As discussed in the Connecting the Dots session, it takes money to make a difference. In many cases, corporate backing can provide that. Corporations are often eager to support sustainable initiatives—or can at least be convinced to do so. These speakers know that from experience and shared that experience to help follow their lead. If companies like Avnet, Arm, and Nordic Semiconductor can get on board, maybe the company you work for can, too.
Build a Power-Efficient Mobile Weather Station With the Thingy:91
Speaker: Didrik Rokhaug
Returning to hands-on workshopping, Nordic Semiconductor’s Didrik Rokhaug taught attendees how to build a mobile weather station using the Nordic Thingy:91 development kit. This low-power weather station makes use of power-saving features to run for years and the Thingy:91’s built-in cellular modem allows for easy data uploads to cloud services. As with the Ribbit Network, weather stations like this one could provide valuable information about the climate — or you can build one for your own personal convenience.
Open Robotics Stack for Underwater Autonomous Vehicles
Speakers: Farhang Naderi, Kat Scott, Ramon Roche, Phil Nelson, Iain Galloway
The surface of our planet pales in scope when compared to the volume of our oceans. But to even begin addressing environmental issues in those depths, we need a way to explore them and collect data. Underwater robots face a number of unique challenges and this session simplifies many of them. It covers a full-stack solution for underwater ROV (remotely-operated vehicle) development, including PX4 autopilot hardware, ROS (Robot Operating System), and OpenCV computer vision for autonomous activity.
Build an AI-Powered Weather Station with WiFi/ LoRa
Speaker: Lakshantha Dissanayake
Rokhaug’s Thingy:91-based weather station was awesome, but it does have a drawback: it requires cellular service. Dissanayake’s weather station based on Seeed Studio’s SenseCAP K1100 development kit integrates LoRa for long range data communication without relying on permanent infrastructure. LoRa can transmit over miles and LoRa networks can extend that range as much as needed. In addition, the Wio Terminal harnesses machine learning to expand the device’s capabilities.
Hackster Café
Speakers: Alex Glow and Chris Adams
Maybe you ride a bicycle to work and compost in your backyard, but you’re reading this article through the internet and the world’s combined internet infrastructure uses a lot of power. The goal of The Green Web Foundation is to transition that infrastructure from fossil-fuel based energy to renewable energy by 2030. One cool way in which they’re achieving that is by providing a tool that lets website owners check to see how green their site is. But that isn’t all The Green Web Foundation does, as Alex Glow found out in her interview with Chris Adams.
Community Spotlight + Hackster Impact Winner Announcement
Speakers: Sashrika Da, Elizabeth Vicarte, Achim Haug, Bryan Costanich, Alex Glow
Another look at the work that members of the Hackster community do and an announcement of the Hackster Impact Award winners. Manu Prakash won as a result of his work designing accessible citizen science instruments, such as the $1 Foldscope that led to the largest microscopy program in the world at 1.7 million units. Shah Selbe won thanks to his conservation efforts through Conservify and FieldKit, the latter of which is an open hardware and software platform for collecting and sharing research data. Michel André won for his groundbreaking work on WACS (Whale Anti-Collision System), which is a bioacoustics system that saves whales from dangerous contact with ships.
Introduction to the AVR-IoT Cellular Mini Development Board
Speaker: Bob Martin
Closing out the event, Bob Martin showcased Microchip’s new AVR-IoT Cellular Mini development board that is sure to become a go-to for sustainable projects in the wild. This nifty new board features a versatile and efficient AVR128DB48 microcontroller, a Sequans Monarch 2 LTE-M cellular modem, an Adafruit Feather footprint, and a Qwiic connector perfect for attaching sensors. Martin demonstrated the new board in an environmental sensor cube that highlights its utility in this space.
Next year…
This year’s Impact Summit was a success and we can’t wait to replicate it next year. Be sure to mark your digital calendar so you don’t miss that and explore the work of all of our talented speakers.