The birth of “TRITON” (An idea to change the world - Tadhack 2017)

Hello Steemians,

Having participated for the first time in a competition of this style in 2016 "TadHack2016" in the category of Carrefour Challenge, We learned different aspects that involve this type of competition, such as effort, dedication and desire to win. Now, for the second consecutive year and push friends to participate in the "TadHack2017", we present you with an idea of cultivating spondylus open sea (which took two days to refine concepts and how to mix technologies Sponsors telecom). The idea arises from a problem off the coast of Ecuador, the spondylus, is considered as a species in danger of extinction due to different factors: environment, climate, pollution and others. The S. princeps species of Spondylus is found off the coast of Ecuador and for the Ecuadorian people this mollusk has a very important archaeological and cultural value, this is because of, since pre-Columbian times this mollusk was served as offerings to the Pachamama, and used like some kind of currency (considered as the red gold), in fact the pre-Hispanic Ecuadorian peoples traded them with other people reach as far north as present-day Mexico and as far south as the central Andes so, that is another reason that motivates to Ecuadorian researchers to preserve this specie.

The problem that presents the current spondylus farming on the sea is that due to different factors, the nets in where the spondylus are cultivated after an uncertain period of time start to accumulate dirt or trash and this factor doesn’t allow the propitious feeding of the spondylus cousin that they don’t grow properly or in the worst of cases they die. Currently, the procedure to determine the level of dirt accumulate in the nets is sending a boat with a scuba diver to check each of the points of spondylus cultivation, but its procedure is expensive and inefficient. Due to all these facts, we decided of focusing in thinking how to provide a low-cost technological solution for this problem, and that was how Triton (a mythological Greek God, considered the messenger of the sea, cool! right?) was born, of course, first the idea born, and after a lot of research and breaking our minds finally found the name that represents the proposed solution =)

Triton was thought for helping to the spondylus farming providing an underwater monitoring system that allow to determine in real time when the nets need to be replaced before that the spondylus start to feel stressed. At this point, we notice that provide this solution have many challenges that we have to face to. Once again after a few cups of wine, a lot of research and a brainstorming, we identified the needed components of the system and design the architecture.

As you can see in the next Figure, the solution provided is based on the integration of physical and software systems. The general idea is to implant a low cost leds (led strips) in the nets in a distributed way and using optical communication (basically leds for the emitter and photodiodes for the receiver) determine the level of dirt present in the net. When the base station receives the information if the optical sensors, It sends this data to an external processing station usually stored in the cloud. At this point, a series of cloud services start to processing the data and determine the level of dirt by zone and indicates to the farmer which ones of the nets associated to the buoys need to by clean or replaced using (the web portal, voice dial, video monitoring or sms notifications).

At this point we have the idea, the architecture and the components, now we have to find the software and Telco API’s that help us to develop the solution, but the magic did the work!!! The Telco API’s of the Tadhack sponsors were the solution!!!. After reading the well documented API in the web of each Telco Provider, we determine that Matrix provides a good API for the manage the asynchronous events generated for the sensors and buoys and we use it for that. On the other hand, For the WebRTC online monitoring component we use the Temasys API for WebRTC and It display an easy use and reliability. Also, for the alert generation, we use two methods, fist a dynamic voice call with an interactive menu generated by the Telestax visual designer, allowing to generate dynamic call according to the events received and Apifonica and his SMS API for generating the dynamic SMS notification.

Ok, after a lot of work, only left one thing, implement it all !!!, but Thanks to the Tadhack challenge and the Sede Madrid Staff we had a well-conditioned place to work with technological infrastructure, a lot of food for keeping the brain worked and release our geek spirit and the constant monitoring of the sponsors, we can achieve the objective of implementing the solution and provide a decent demo for the challenge.

Thanks for reading,