i2CAT boosts STEM innovation among students

The center has hosted a project to develop and deploy a live-monitoring platform for urban gardens

Visualization of the Whitecat platform, including display and sensors to measure a plant’s parameters.

Mahel Berthod, a 15 year-old student from Barcelona, has spent a 15-day working experience stage at i2CAT developing an innovative platform to monitor urban gardens. The platform is based on a board that offers a variety of programming possibilities and levels, making it perfect for educational STEM projects.

Mahel’s project is aimed at schools and high-schools that wish to create a monitoring platform for their urban gardens. This platform consists of an ESP32 N1 Whitecat board that can be assembled with a wide array of sensors (rain, light, UV, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, etc.) depending on the particular project. The board, which includes a display, allows for different levels of programming difficulty through the BLOCS language, and the data gathered by the sensors is sent through a LoRa gateway connected through The Things Network to a centralized platform.

By deploying this platform, students can control the evolution of their urban garden and modify its monitoring capabilities according to the garden’s needs.

The excellent work developed by Mahel during his stage demonstrates the effectiveness of the Whitecat board, the BLOCS language and LoRa connectivity to carry out STEM projects at schools and high schools. i2CAT is committed to promoting STEM talent among young students and creating tools that help educational institutions in this task.