The Community-Created Projects at Hackster Impact Summit 2023

Hackster Impact Summit 2023

This year's Hackster Impact Summit is centered around the ways in which industry, engineers, and innovators can leverage emerging technologies for the benefit of their cities and communities. Throughout the free, two-day virtual event, speakers representing Nordic Semiconductor, Arm, BrainChip, Blues, Renesas, and several other companies will be hosting sessions, but there will also be 10 community spotlights that highlight the work being done by our community. These sessions will feature Hackster members and the projects they have created with the aim of making their urban environments more resilient, safer, and more sustainable.

Predictive maintenance

Modern infrastructure is critical to how we live our lives, and even a minor disruption to a service such as potable (drinking) water delivery or electricity transmission can have massive consequences. Four of the speakers have played a part in creating projects that utilize predictive maintenance and AI to preemptively alert workers that something is close to failure.

Ivan Arakistan has published many projects that deal with monitoring elevator health. As part of this series, he has built an edge AI sound monitoring device based on the Blues Notecard and Edge Impulse which can automatically send alerts via a cellular connection if an anomaly is found. Going even further, each elevator can be associated with a digital twin to show real-time statistics and operation.

In an effort to increase the productivity and efficiency of assembly lines, Anshuman Fauzdar harnessed a combination of technologies, including the Sony Spresense, cameras, microphones, and an ESP32, to detect sub-optimal conditions. Data is continuously acquired through an array of sensors, fed through AI models, and then transformed into a notification for a nearby worker to address in hopes of catching a bad product, excess noise, and more.

Also using the Blues Notecard in combination with a Seeed Studio Wio Terminal is Pradeep S's motor anomaly detection device. In his project, he explains how he collected a dataset with the Wio Terminal's built-in accelerometer and created a classification model from it. If an anomaly is found, the Notecard can automatically generate an alert and send it over MQTT for aggregation by dashboards or an email client with IFTTT.

The final predictive maintenance project, TinyAutomator, will be discussed by Zalmotek's Constantin Craciun. As a member of the seven-person team who created the system, Craciun helped to develop this sensor-packed platform which combines an industrial controller with a Raspberry Pi 4-based programmable logic controller (PLC). In doing so, it can take readings, perform classification via an edge AI Linux model, and send wireless alerts to the plant manager.

Teaching sustainability

Climate change has been making its impacts felt worldwide, and now more than ever, it is vital to know how our crops will respond to different growing environments. The Plant Observatory of Weather Adaptability for Resilience, or POWAR, is the brainchild of Pablo Zuloaga Betancourt and features both a Wio Terminal for cloud functionality and a custom ESP32 board for communicating with sensors. All of this data allows students and community members to understand the risks climate change poses to our ability to grow food.

Smarter recycling

Sustainability is not just about reducing energy consumption and material usage, but also includes the ways we go about handling our trash. As Samuel Alexander, the creator of an AI-powered recycling bin points out, nearly 50% of our trash can be recycled but most is not due to incorrect sorting. His system, however, relies on audio classification, a rotating platform, and a trapdoor to intelligently sort trash by sound the moment it gets thrown into the bin.

Air quality monitoring

As our cities and industries continue to rapidly expand, so does our output of pollutants including CO2, ozone, and nitrogen dioxide. In an attempt to better understand pollution levels and when they rise and fall, Kutluhan Aktar built an all-in-one atmosphere monitoring station packed with sensors, IoT capabilities, and an edge AI model for determining the health risks posed by current levels. All of these data points can then be logged to an SD card and/or sent to a web app which shows past readings along with a livestream of the outside.

Rethinking the electric meter

While nearly all modern power meters have the ability to provide the utility company with real-time consumption data, some older variants in use today only have a basic digital or analog dial readout and therefore make it difficult for users to track their power utilization. As George Ifeanyi Igwegbe will speak about, his project is able to overcome this problem by using an OpenMV H7+ board/camera module to capture digits, train a classification model with Edge Impulse, and then read the meter's current value.

Surface crack and pothole detection

The final pair of projects being showcased both deal with keeping our concrete/asphalt infrastructure maintained and free of potential hazards. Potholes cause billions of dollars in damage to our vehicles each year, and this is what prompted Justin Lutz to combine the Sony Spresense main board, camera board, and LTE extension into a highly useful product. Through image classification at the edge, the project can detect a pothole and mark in on a virtual map in real-time thanks to GPS and LTE connectivity.

In a similar manner, Naveen Kumar's Surface Crack Detection and Localization system features a compact all-in-one device complete with a Raspberry Pi Computer Module 4, camera, Seeed Studio reTerminal, and battery pack. These components work together to produce a heatmap of surface cracks that can be viewed on the screen by workers or inspectors for later repair.

Don't miss Hackster Impact Summit 2023

If the technologies and applications used in these projects sound interesting, join us at the Hackster Impact Summit where the creators, panelists, and keynote speakers will all be sharing ways in which we can improve our cities.

UPDATE (11/28/2029: All of the session recordings from Hackster Impact Summit 2023 are live! If you missed any talks, couldn't attend the event, or want to rewatch your favorite workshops, check out our playlist now.