In Malaysia, small and medium enterprises (SME) have sprung up over the past years that are vying to cultivate stingless bee for honey. Farmers will extract the honey from the combs manually by using a small and long plastic tube hosed into a portable battery powered suction pump. Current harvesting system was performed by collecting the honey from the combs and at irregular intervals in time. This is because the farmers usually do not exactly know the systematic way to estimate the amount of honey produced. In respect of sustainable development, stingless bees are good pollinators for agricultural crops such as starfruit, guava, citrus, mango, watermelon, durian, and coconut. The value of insect pollination service of these crops was estimated in millions.

Availability of plants, flowers characteristics, forager activity time, and environmental factors influence the honey production of stingless bees. Therefore, an intensive study of the impact of climate on the activities of a stingless honey bee in a significant time period that spans at least one season cycle is important for future plan to mediate between the sustainability of honey bee production and the environment. Manual collection of data for chosen factors can be sporadic and produce variations from incorrect measurement taking; this can cause complications in producing any important interpretation. However, the feasibility of online monitoring of beehive based on IoT application, its limitation, and performance are not explored well.

The ubiquity of advanced Wireless Sensor Network and information technologies has been a key enabler networking everyday objects. Collective physical items in a system equipped with “Internet of Things (IoT)” can communicate with each other while integrating the physical world with a computer-based system in a more direct way, and greatly improve resources efficiency in addition to alleviate human intervention. If the information of the environment is being collected on the platform of IoT, there are several advantages: can reduce effort and time required for monitoring a particular environment, the logging of data allows for reduced likelihood of data being misplaced or lost, and sensor nodes could be placed in critical spots without the need to put personnel in perilous situations.

In this project, we focus on understanding the impact of climate on stingless bee activities using IoT applications based on FAVORIOT platform. We also aimed to present the theory to describe the behavior of the stingless bee and combine it with the population size, and the number of honey productions, the theory will enable the estimation of honey production with bee health estimation models. Furthermore, all determined climate parameters, activities rates, population size, and honey productions values will be a set of reference to determine the heath level of the stingless honey bee population.

[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]