Using Open Tools to Transform Retired Equipment into Powerful Engineering Education Instruments: A Smart Agri-IoT Control Example

People getting involved with modern agriculture should become familiar with and able to exploit the plethora of cutting-edge technologies that have recently appeared in this area. The contribution of the educational robotics in demystifying new scientific fields for K-12 students is remarkable, but things become more challenging when trying to discover efficient practices for higher education. Indeed, there is an apparent need for pilot examples facilitating students’ professional skills acquisition and thus matching the potential of the actual systems used in the modern agricultural premises. In this regard, this work discuses laboratory experiences while implementing an automatic airflow control system of convincing size and role capable for remote configuration and monitoring. This non-conventional robotic example exploits retired electromechanical equipment, from an old farm, and revives it using modern widely available microcontrollers, smart phones/tablets, network transceivers, motor drivers, and some cheap and/or custom sensors. The contribution of the corresponding software parts to this transformation is of crucial importance for the success of the whole system. Thankfully, these parts are implemented using easy-to-use programming tools, of open and free nature at most, that are suitable for the pairing credit-card-sized computer systems. The proposed solution is exhibiting modularity and scalability and assists students and future professionals to better understand the role of key elements participating in the digital transformation of the agricultural sector. The whole approach has been evaluated from both technical and educational perspective and delivered interesting results that are also reported

Using Open Tools to Transform Retired Equipment into Powerful Engineering Education Instruments: A Smart Agri-IoT Control Example

People getting involved with modern agriculture should become familiar with and able to exploit the plethora of cutting-edge technologies that have recently appeared in this area. The contribution of the educational robotics in demystifying new scientific fields for K-12 students is remarkable, but things become more challenging when trying to discover efficient practices for higher education. Indeed, there is an apparent need for pilot examples facilitating students’ professional skills acquisition and thus matching the potential of the actual systems used in the modern agricultural premises. In this regard, this work discuses laboratory experiences while implementing an automatic airflow control system of convincing size and role capable for remote configuration and monitoring. This non-conventional robotic example exploits retired electromechanical equipment, from an old farm, and revives it using modern widely available microcontrollers, smart phones/tablets, network transceivers, motor drivers, and some cheap and/or custom sensors. The contribution of the corresponding software parts to this transformation is of crucial importance for the success of the whole system. Thankfully, these parts are implemented using easy-to-use programming tools, of open and free nature at most, that are suitable for the pairing credit-card-sized computer systems. The proposed solution is exhibiting modularity and scalability and assists students and future professionals to better understand the role of key elements participating in the digital transformation of the agricultural sector. The whole approach has been evaluated from both technical and educational perspective and delivered interesting results that are also reported

Extending an open media-streaming platform to support Differentiated Services

Abstract – In this paper, architectural extensions for enhancing an open media-streaming platform with differentiated services mechanisms are studied, implemented, and experimentally evaluated. Towards this end, an appropriate layering is adopted in order to enable definition of Quality of Service (QoS) specifications and their mapping to network parameters during transmission. Furthermore, a component dedicated to the off-line study of quality requirements is specified and integrated into the QoS aware platform. This component enables to preview the effects of quality violations on media streams, before they are transmitted to the network, by simulating packet losses/delays during the packetization process. Based on this component, a suitable quality metric is introduced for video streams, which is sensitive both to spatial and temporal distortion effects and can be easily applied to other types of streams, or to groups of related streams (e.g. synchronized audio-video). The aforementioned extensions are implemented on the open source MPEG4IP platform. The applicability of certain QoS policies is experimentally evaluated over a laboratory-based DiffServ testbed. In this case, QoS specifications are mapped to DiffServ compliant Type of Service (ToS) values during transmission. Experiments are conducted with an MPEG-4 encoded video stream under different network configurations, QoS policies, and error resilience mechanisms. The performance of the stream is evaluated based on the proposed quality metric