Smart Citizen is a platform, founded by Tomas Diez – IAAC | Fab Lab Barcelona – and Alex Posada – MID, Hangar – for the generation of social participatory processes in urban areas. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive and open indicators, and distributed tools, bringing thereafter to the collective construction of the city for and by its own inhabitants.

The project is in constant expansion with more than 1000 kits in the world. Check the project live on smartcitizen.me

 

Smart Citizen

What are the real levels of air pollution around your home or business? and what about noise pollution? and humidity?

Now imagine that you could know them, share instantly and compare with other places in your city, in real time … How could this information help to improve our environmental quality?

From Smart Citizen, we want to answer these questions and many more, through the development of low-cost sensors. Now you can be one of these sensors in a network by supporting this project. But we will not stop here … How can we build a real Smart City…by Smart Citizens?

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The Smart Citizen project is based on geolocation, Internet and free hardware and software for data collection and sharing ( Smart Citizen Kit – SCK , RESTful api, Mobile App and, the web community ), and (in a second phase) the production of objects; it connects people with their environment and their city to create more effective and optimized relationships between resources, technology, communities, services and events in the urban environment.

It connects people with their environment and their city, creating more effective and optimized relationships between resources, technology, communities, services and events in the urban environment. This project has successfully been deployed, as an initial phase, in the city of Barcelona, and is currently being deployed in Amsterdam in collaboration with Amsterdam Smart City and Waag Society, and Manchester in collaboration with Future Everything and Intel.

Smart Citizen Kit

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The first layer is a piece of hardware comprised by two printed-circuit boards: an interchangeable daughterboard or shield, and an arduino-compatible data-processing board. We have nicknamed the shield developed for this campaign ‘The Ambient Board.’ As the name suggests, it carries sensors that measure air composition (CO and NO2), temperature, light intensity, sound levels, and humidity. Once it’s set up, the ambient board is able to stream data measured by the sensors over Wi-Fi using the FCC-certified, wireless module on the data-processing board. The device’s low power consumption allows for placing it on balconies and windowsills. Power to the device can be provided by a solar panel and/or battery. All the design files (schematics and PCB layout) for this Open-Source, Arduino-compatible device are available on our Github repository.

Credits

The project is born within Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, both focused centres on the impact of new technologies at different scales of human habitat, from the bits to geography. The project has been possible thanks to the collaboration and active support of MID.

The project is developed in collaboration with Hangar, Goteo and La Fosca.

Actual partners include Amsterdam Smart City, Waag Society, Future Everything, Cisco, Intel, Ajuntament de Barcelona, Barcelona Cultura, Array Of Things and Organicity.

People behind the project include: Tomas Diez, Alex Posada, Guillem Camprodon, Alexandre Dubor, Leonardo Arrata, Aitor Aloa, Ángel Muñoz, Gabriel Bello-Diaz.

-> get more information on http://smartcitizen.me

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