Solar Powered Carbon Footprint Monitoring System

Let us do our best to reduce Carbon emissions and save our Planet.

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Hello everybody, my name is Yao Weishi Vincent and I am 11 years old. I am glad to introduce the project I created recently for the TPCC DMIG Green Micro:Bit challenge.

Inspiration

Since I am the Green Ambassador in my school, I know a lot of problems caused by mankind and want to use this chance to design a project to help us protect our planet.

What it does

The Micro:Bit reads climate data (CO2, temperature and humidity) from various sensors and then send out the data through bluetooth. The whole system is powered by a solar panel which is a clean and affordable energy. The whole system will remain in deep sleep mode and wake up only when necessary to save energy.

How I built it

Components:

  • Micro:Bit V2 since only V2 supports power save mode
  • SGP30 I2C CO2 sensor
  • AHT20 I2C temperature and humidity sensor
  • Solar panel power source of the system
  • Super capacitor power storage to keep the system working at night when there is no sunlight
  • IO extension board to connect the Micro:Bit with the sensors and power

Finally, I used lego pieces to fix all these components.

Challenges I ran into

At first, I used a Micro:Bit V1.3 which I later found out that it has limited memory. After turning on bluetooth, there is no memory available for other operations. So, I changed to a V2 Micro:Bit which has bigger memory and also support power save mode.

For the SGP30 (carbon dioxide sensor), I realised that there was no existing MakeCode extension which can work with it so I made some functions following the instruction provided by the data sheet.

Another challenge is that the Micro:Bit does not support Wifi and only support Bluetooth and 2.4G Radio so it cannot send the data directly to the cloud. I used a BLE2Cloud proxy that will forward data collected by Bluetooth to Google Sheet so we can access real time data on any device.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I used things I learnt from the TPCC DMIG workshop to create a project that can help save our planet.

What I learned

I learnt how to

  • add third party extensions into my project
  • read data through I2C
  • use bluetooth
  • use power save mode of the Micro:Bit V2

What's next for test

We can use my system to gather data for a few days and analyse the pattern of carbon emissions:

  • What will contribute to the most carbon emission (factories, vehicles, human, plants)
  • When will there be the most carbon emissions

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