Shoulder (Emergency lane) is used by the emergency vehicles such as ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars when there is heavy traffic jam happened or when there is an emergency. Under Rule53(1) of the Road Traffic Rules 1959, driving in the emergency lane is an offense. Yet, there is still the irresponsible driver who misuse the emergency lane especially when there is traffic congestion. Drivers keep repeating to the offense the rule because they know that police are not always there to watch over them.

Hence a method to detect the vehicles who misuse the emergency lane by using internet of things is proposed. The use of internet of things keep increasing from year to year and it is applicable to many fields such as energy management, environmental monitoring, and home automation.

There have been several projects done previously for real-time traffic monitoring by using Zigbee and Bluetooth for the transmission of the data. But there are some challenges faced by the projects which are the huge power consumption of the sensor node, limited coverage area and the cost of maintenance is high. Hence LoRa technology is used in this project to replace the current wireless transmission module. LoRa is a wireless technology that has been developed to enable low data rate communication to be made over long distance by sensors for the Internet of Things application.

In this project, sensor nodes attached with camera sensor will be placed on the highways, vehicles who misuse the emergency lane will be detected by the ultrasonic sensor and the camera will auto capture the vehicles (including car plate number). The collected data will be sent to the FAVORIOT IoT middleware via a gateway at a station, by using LoRa wireless module for further action such as issues ticket to the driver. The objectives of this project are to real-time monitoring the emergency lane and to reduce the number of drivers who misuse the emergency lane.

[NOTE: This project is being done by UTM, our FAVORIOT’s University’s collaborator]

Wheel balancing robot for edutainment application. This project combines 3 core elements – robotic, IoT, and entertainment – for targeted educational purposes, ie. STEM. A robotics application which consists remotely control the ed robot via smartphone, and data capturing, storing, analysis and display using IoT platforms framework based on FAVORIOT is considered.

The framework used can be applied in various IoT based edutainment courses/games like line following balancing robot, wall following balancing robot & etc. Then the competitors will be notified their robot status, control performance and result. Furthermore, the framework is not only limited to the highlighted courses but also can be utilized to other relevant IoT-robotics applications.Io

[NOTE: This project is being done by UTM, our FAVORIOT’s University’s collaborator]

The objective of this project is to help people who love farming and gardening to monitor their plants at home. Lots of gardeners do not know whether their plants have been supplied with sufficient water, light, and fertilizer for a healthy growth. Every day, they just guessing the amount of water their plants need, without knowing either is sufficient or not. In order to overcome this, most of the gardener will be overwatering their plants, this will make waste of water. Make thing more worst is when they are busy with their job or have to go for a vacation.

This project provides a solution by developing a smart vase that can monitor conditions of the plants and ensure sufficient water supplied. This product monitor conditions of the plants by using sensors that embedded in the smart vase. Three sensors are included in the developed smart vase: DHT 11 sensor that will monitor surrounding temperature and humidity, LDR sensor module that will monitor light intensity surrounding the plants and lastly soil moisture sensor that will measure the moisture of the soil of the smart vase.

The most interesting part of this product is the capability to ensure sufficient amount of water required by the plants and avoid water being wasted. When the soil humidity is low, the smart vase will be watering the plant. However, when the soil humidity is high, the smart vase will stop watering the plant. In order to achieve it, an intelligent watering mechanism is designed and included in the product. Because of this, the smart vase includes a water pump and a reservoir in its design.  All the sensors and the water pump are connected to Arduino Uno, which is selected as the microcontroller. This product also has wifi capability that allows sensor reading to be pushed to the Favoriot platform. The smart vase will be used with an android app for the gardener to keep track of their plant’s condition and assess accordingly.

To evaluate and optimise the performance of the smart vase, few experimental works will be conducted and feedback from the Agriculture Department will be taken into consideration during the design. We believe that this smart vase will be in every house helping the gardener taking care of their loved plants.

[NOTE: This project is being done by UTHM, our FAVORIOT’s University’s collaborator. Article by: Muhammad Hilmi Husaini bin Mohd Nizam]