Mbare is one of oldest, poorest, crime-ridden and unhygienic townships in Zimbabwe. For instance in the year 2016, Mbare was the most affected area by a Typhoid outbreak, which resulted in 9 deaths, 85 confirmed cases and 2,352 suspected cases. Availing access to tools and information on how communities can use open technologies in general and IoT in particular to alleviate abject poverty would be a small but worthy step towards igniting the fight against hunger and destitution in Mbare.
The idea of starting a Community Aquaponics Project in Mbare was inspired by a mini-project implemented by students in the IoT Makerspace Project in 2016 at St Peter's Secondary School. As a way to engage the Makerspace students in a real problem-solving project two Arduino-based Open Aquarium kits were procured from Cooking Hacks in Spain.
The ultimate goal of the project is to develop an Aquaponics setup that is reproducible using inexpensive technology which is self-sustaining and results in predictable high yields. The overall intention is to balance high quality setup with the least cost by using best technology that is free and open source.
Aquaponics combines the benefits of Aquaculture and Hydroponics to create a self-sustaining farming ecosystem. The system will contain a water filtration system, an advanced sensor suite and remote monitoring capabilities. Utilising 1000 litres IBC totes, participants will grow vegetables and fish using data collecting sensors and environment-regulating actuators.
Arduino units will be connected to a sensor network and actuators within the IBC totes housing the Aquaponics system. IoT applications including a Nodered web application and MongoDB database will run on Raspberry Pi units and provide real-time management information in the form of graphs and pattern representations.
The project will use 90 percent less water than conventional farms and the water will be recycled. Fertilizer to plants in the form of fish waste is recycled. The project will not use pesticides as the containers are essentially sealed environments. The controlled environment will also enable vegetables to be grown in normally off-season periods as the climatic conditions can be controlled.
- Arduino Uno
- Arduino IO expansion Shield
- Electroconductivity Sensor
- Temperature Sensor
- Ph Sensor
- Water Level Sensor
- Fish Feeder
- Raspberry Pi 3
- RTC Module
- Analog Isolator
- Arduino 1.8
- Node.js 8 (LTS) and npm 3
- Node-red 16
- Node-red nodes: Dashboard, Serialport, mongodb
- Mongodb NoSQL DBMS
- Kubernetes
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent