Smart Cities Tiny House ERA

Introduction

Hello, my name is Edmond Lascaris and I'm a Local Government Officer at the City of Whittlesea in Melbourne Australia. I work in the Sustainability Environment Department and for the last ten years I've been doing outreach program in locals schools and libraries teaching sustainability using environmental sensors. The sensors give students real data on the world around them and I think this makes the subject matter more real and tangible to students.

Raspberry Pi

It all began back in 2012 when the department I was in had a little money left over to do waste education in schools. The Raspberry Pi computer had just been developed in the UK. If you're not already familiar with the Raspberry Pi it is a small credit card sized computer that only costs a few tens of pounds. It was designed to encourage more young people to start hacking and learning about technology. You just need plug in a monitor, mouse, keyboard and a small power supply.

I used the small amount of funding available to buy some Raspberry Pi computers and then rang around to different universities to see if they had old computer equipment. One university (La Trobe) said yes and that allowed us to build a computer lab for Lalor Primary School.

Teh original funding was to help support waste reduction and here we had saved some computer equipment be re-purposing it for a primary school.

The school was fortunate the make it to the finals of the Victorian Government's Premier's Sustainability awards. They didn't win but it showed that this little computer was living up the promise of making computer literacy more accessible to schools and helping to tackle an electronic (e-waste) problem at the same time.

The name Raspberry Pi evolved because several great computers were named after fruit. The Pi is not the mathematical ratios for circles, but rather is a shortening of a computer language called Python.

Platypus project

The focus of my work at Local government relates to water quality. There had been a series of pollution events at a local waterway in 2017 that were possibly affecting the health of local platypus in the Plenty river.

I was teaching students at a local library and collectively we decided to work on an environmental sensor to help detect these pollution events.

This was my first real experience with building sensors, sending data and analysing it on a Raspberry Pi. The students took up the challenge and helped launch the sensor.

From the student's perspective it was like working on a satellite for a space program.

They needed to use solar PV panels, they had to work on energy management systems and batteries. They worked on the communications equipment and the small computer brain within the sensor. They also entered their project in a local ICT competition called teh Young ICT Explorers competition and finished second in the state.

Whittlesea Tech School Epping

Now I teach mainly at the Whittlesea Tech School. Secondary students come to do a Smart Cities course. We specialise in building sensors and analysing the data on the Raspberry Pi, building Dashboards so that the data can be easily visualise and interpreted.

Climate Change

The students are acutely aware of the challenges of Climate Change. On the one hand Australian has been devestated by intense bush fires. In 2019 cities on the East coast of Australia were blanketed in smoke. Fires destroyed millions of native animals, tens of thousands of hectares of bush, destroyed homes and killed more than 100 people. Extreme heat and drought conditions had helped make this event more extreme.

Australia also has to grapple with floods and more intense rain events. The incredible Great Barrier reef has also been subject to more frequent coral bleaching events.