1.1. Original idea
A couple of years ago I worked on designing and producing a rainwater harvesting system for my Final Degree Project in a rural area called East Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, India.
The system was created as a solid bamboo structure, that was connected to the rooftop of a primary school in a village called Mawsynram. The project is thought to be educational, self-sufficient, and locally built and adapted; specially for developing communities.
The reason of focusing in rural areas is to foster the community use of natural resources in these rural areas, where people are more relunctant to share and invest on these goods. Moreover, the next image shows (in black) the parts of the system I worked on during that time, and (in blue) the ones I will focus as Fabacademy Final Project.
The next image shows a top view of the system connected from the building's rooftop to the WC and crops, to reuse the water collected by the structure.
1.2. Project idea
Therefore, the project idea will remain in a device that could receive and display/store environmental data to get a full network locally connected and a realtime/historical database from these isolated villages.
This weather station should complement the collector structure, and hopefully integrated in the system.
1.3. Referents
I need to know first what has been done before. In addition, while working on this project in Meghalaya, I found a group of engineering students that developed a similar device that consisted on a rain and wind gauge, solar powered, that sent the data via sms to multiple devices. This is a picture I took from that weather station:
Another important referent is Smart Citizen, a sensor kit for urban areas to measure environmental and pollution data, that was developed here in FabLab Barcelona.
For the integration of the device into the system, I would like to try different techniques of material and production research specially to work on joints, with reusable and recyclable materials as shown below:
Plastic bottle and 3D printed joints
Warkawater tower in Ethyopia