Awards & Nominations
VAMK'd has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
Help People Understand the Importance of Solar Wind Effects on Day-to-Day Life
High-Level Project Summary
Helping people understand how solar radiation affects their day-to-day life is our goal with this project. We plan to do it with 3 approaches as follows:- Informational Website- Solar information integration with Smart Home systems- 3D browser based game in which settings are impacted by Solar Wind speed and Intensity
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our Project: Creative Data Display with the Parker Solar Probe
Our Team: We are 6, 3rd year IT students from different parts of the world studying in the IT2020 Batch of Vaasa University of Applied Sciences in the B.Eng IT stream.
- Kunal Menon - Project Manager
- Mykola Zhabko - Software Team
- Gonzalo Araya - Software Team
- Bogdan Rudnevskii - Hardware / Software Team
- Sergiu Petrut - Hardware Team
- Ali Aldulaimi - Hardware Team
We thought of creating various approaches with regard to this challenge. Our hardware team decided to work on Smart Home integration. Our software team worked on an interactive game. Our project manager worked on creating a website where we could put up some information with regard to the impact of solar storms on a common man.
Information Website - The aim was to create an information website which provides information in a simple format for people to understand how solar storms can impact them and how it could affect their day-to-day life and how they can be better prepared. Sadly there aren't many websites which educate people on this issue, especially the risks and actions to take incase of emergencies.
Tools/Tech Used: VScode, HTML5/CSS3, JavaScript, Photoshop.
Smart Home Integration - Our goal was to create a smart home integrated solution where we could receive notifications on google nest hub or such smart devices to alert people with regards to approaching solar storms. We also planned to have the solution integrated with other smart devices around the home like having the light's colour/brightness change based on the intensity of the approaching geomagnetic storm. Also, advice people via the Nest Hub or similar device to take precautions, in case there is a severe storm upcoming. The data for the integration was pulled from NASA's DONKI API and also from api.auroras.live.
Tools/Tech Used: VScode, Python, Linux, HomeAssistant, NASA DONKI API, api.auroras.live, Smart Light Integration, Google Assistant Integration.
Interactive 3D Game - We planned to create a game depicting a spaceship flying near the sun through some asteroids. The health of the spaceship would be impacted by the intensity of the solar radiation and the ship would drift due to the speed of the solar winds. We also got ideas to develop it further for use in a VR environment but didn't seem possible in the timeframe.
Tools/Tech Used: VScode, Git, Webpack, Blender, Three.js, NASA DONKI API.
Space Agency Data
NASA Donki API with regard to Coronal Mass Ejection
Hyperion Asteroid Photo from NASA
Sun Photo from NASA
Solar System photo from NASA
Hackathon Journey
Overall it has been a very good learning experience. Our solutions were developed to see how far we have come in our studies and see what we can do in the short timeframe of 2 days. We learnt about many new technologies, how to work in a team setting, how to think creatively to solve problems and how various technologies can be applied. Our inspiration for choosing this challenge was how we could apply both the software and hardware knowledge gained to a challenge and this seemed to fit the purpose.
We started the project work in an agile manner by creating smaller deliverables and accomplishing them. We did incremental development so that at every stage a milestone was met and we accomplished something. We distributed tasks according to people's skillset so they were comfortable with what they were doing.
We did face many setbacks including burning out a couple of Raspberry Pi or non-responsive/failed API calls and other such issues. We tackled them by finding more methods to create a solution.
References
LogoSpaceMan
English: A picture of an astronaut in flat design.
Date28 September 2020, 05:54:53
Sourcehttps://www.freepik.com/free-vector/cute-astronaut-operating-laptop-cartoon-vector-icon-illustration-science-technology-icon_10411620.htm#page=1&query=science%20logo&position=10
AuthorCatalyststuff
What are Solar Winds?
Source https://www.space.com/22215-solar-wind.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1921_geomagnetic_storm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms
https://threejs.org/
https://www.blender.org/
Tags
#hardware, #software, #3d, #sun, #game, #vamk, #vaasa, #automation, #parkersolarprobe