Livelo

This morning we went to Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP). This non-profit entity, created in 2001 by the Hong-Kong government, tends to boost the innovation in order to diversify the local economy. Hong-Kong would like to reindustrialise its economy by supporting company working on Healthy Aging, Robotics and Smart City. Thank this transformation, Hong Kong hopes to become the “new epicentre of tech innovation”.

Later in the day we had the chance to visit the company Lalamove which is the new “Uber for logistics”. The presentation of their company made clear that customising services by country is essential in a scale-up phase.

After that, we had the great opportunity to go on a containership. OOCL allowed us to come on board of one of its ship, the Houston. Its size was very impressive even though it is “only” a 4’500 twenty-foot equivalent units boat. OOCL has been bought in July 2017 by COSCO, a Chinese shipping company. This 6.3 billion deal makes COSCO the third largest shipping company in the world.

In the evening, we all pitch at BRINC. BRINC is an IoT accelerator which sells its services to entrepreneurs. BRINC has different programs to assists startups in designing products and start manufacturing. Their feedbacks helped us a lot to enhance our presentations and technical aspects of our projects.

What we can remember from this day are:
1. The economy of Hong Kong is under pressure and it is experiencing a tough competition with China. Shenzhen is the 3rd largest port in the world by throughput. In the same time last year, Hong Kong had a decrease of 9.7% of its throughput and slipped of one place in the rankings to the 5th place. Hong Kong deep berth port is becoming less and less an essential sea interface for China.

2. Hong Kong has to transform its economy and move from a services economy to a more industrialized one. Fortunately, the stability brought by the rule of law and its place in the world economy thanks to its taxation system make Hong Kong as a fantastic place for investments. Two points extremely necessary to create an innovation environment based on startups. However, the lack of production power makes Hong Kong very vulnerable if it doesn’t export products from China anymore and continue to import most of its needs from there. That’s why the initiative of the government to invest in innovation and reindustrialisation through robotic and IoT is really relevant.

Today was D-day: we were finally flying to Hong-Kong! At 8am, we had a last workshop at EPFL, to practice our pitching skills, and learn more about the schedule of the trip.

In the afternoon, Marc made a brief introduction on China and Hong-Kong situation regarding their economy, society and politics.
In order to be ready to face the cultural shock, we played a card game with special rules that we had to understand without talking (but we are not going to spoil this game for next year batch 😉 )
Then we went to Geneva airport by bus and after an endless waiting queue, we finally took off to Frankfurt and Hong-Kong!

12 hours later, we were led to Hong-Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) which would kindly host us for the coming week. We passed along the sea, between the huge harbors and skyscrapers (if one word were to describe the city, I would use “démesure”).  The weather was as expected: sunny, 32°C and very humid.

After visiting the rooms, some of us went to visit Hong-Kong and experienced local food and beers…

This first day was amazing but exhausting!

For several weeks, the waterproofing of our device was a big problem. The last test in the Hydraulic Machines Lab (HML) was not successful at all and we made our PCB drown in water. Fortunately, it was not connected to the battery so it survived.

Eventually, we tried an alternative way to ensure the waterproofing (adding cyanoacrylate and SikaBond to the opening). Since the HML’s facility was not available anymore at that point, we decided to make our tests in the nearest place providing high pressure liquid medium, Léman Lake! We rent a pedalo, pedaled a few hundreds of meters to reach a point where the water was around 30-meter deep (finding deeper places implied to pedal much further, but actually we were not allowed to go further than 50 meters from the shore so…). It turned out that the device was waterproof under such conditions and even sampled relevant pressure data (see the figures). This is very encouraging since it shows our first prototype is functional (at least this time). The next steps are:

• checking the precision of the device (the depth measurements were made with a simple rope this time),
• finding a way to sink the device properly  (we cannot add the big rock you see in our package unfortunately),
• checking if the waterproofing is sustainable over time
• working on a 2nd version of the PCB & the Android app.

At the end of this week, we finally managed to implement the most important functionalities of our microcontroller, which was a huge relief! Now we are able to automatically log pressure samples for at least one year (a few lines of code need to be added to extend storage capacity to two years) and the device is ready to be read as well. However this is a proof of concept, we have been using a development board implementing our microcontroller. The goal now is to do the same thing but with our own PCB. In addition to this, another task is to code a proper Android application compatible with our device. Hopefully we can do that before the 3rd milstone.

We have also assembled the pressure sensor and the bottle cap. We will test its waterproofing next week when we’ll go back to the hydraulics laboratory of EPFL.

This week we have finally (and fortunately) met M. Farhat, a fluid mechanics teacher at EPFL. It turned out that EPFL has many high-end facilities allowing to simulate high pressurized media – exactly what we need. M. Farhat was very interested in our project and allowed us to test the waterproofing of some samples. The results were encouraging, showing that basic preforms&caps seem to be waterproof under at least 7 bars of pressure. Longer tests are to be done next week, when we will also meet another engineer, specialist in waterproofing design.

Regarding coding and electronics, the prototype is functional and can store up to 5 days of data. However we are trying to implement an external memory which would allow us to store up to 2 years of data! The phone application is also progressing : based on Elise’s mockup, Rémi has made a basic app which will soon implements NFC communication!

All the components have arrived and also the produced PCB is ready… What does that mean? Start soldering!

With a little instruction from our super-assistant Gilbert, Tobia spent the morning soldering all the components onto the printed circuit board. This will allow him to perform the antenna matching – the NFC antenna has to be tuned to resonate at a given frequency in order to be able to communicate – during the next week.

In the last weeks the whole team brainstormed in order to find a name for our product that could represent it and at the same time represent the team’s mindset. Several interesting ideas came out, but one got clearly favored by all of us:

Livelo

Originating from the italian noun livello, it clearly illustrates the functionality of our device. It also satisfies the other criteria as for example to sound good, and looking esthetic.

Later Elise, our interaction designer, worked to develop a logo and a branding. The colors and the lines in the pattern remind of the level curves of a groundwater map.

After a well earned week of relax (at least on paper) and a lot of eating (easter bunnies and co.), our team is back to work. Each one of us is tweaking the last details with respect to the second milestone at the end of the week. For the presentation, Viktor and Tobia are thinking of an elevator pitch to get the audience to the point in the fastest way possible and be able to explain the importance of a scalable groundwaterlevel monitoring in a few sentences.

The past two weeks were essentially dedicated to the electronic part of the device. The first version of the PCB has been designed and its production was launched. We hope we can get it by the end of the holidays. The other important part is about the microcontroller. It took us quite much time to familiarize with it, especially because the one we chose is not widespread as Arduino microcontrollers can be. This means we have to write the whole code by ourselves from scratch! At the moment, the pressure sensor is about to work and the next step is to implement the NFC functionality.

Concerning the body of the probe, we are still contacting and looking for companies which could provide us with PET preformed samples so that we can design the lid and test the waterproofing of such a device. Since companies usually sell huge amounts of these, it is difficult to ask for a few samples…

At this stage we have entered a field where none of us is at ease with and even though it is sometimes difficult to move forward, such challenges are very exciting!

This week was a relatively calm week, principally dedicated to “branding”.

We have arrived at a point where our product, the data logger, is slowly becoming tangible and we have to start thinking about what we, as project and group, want to transmit and represent through it. This has become very clear to us lately, the more we talked with people that are active in the humanitarean sector. That’s why our weekly meeting has been mainly a brainstorming about possible names that we could give to our product, and discussions about the more general view and meaning of it.

On the other hand we also discussed the feedback received after the first milestone presentation, held last 24th march, in order to readjust our objectives.

G3ID is a large show room of innovative and humanitarian companies and associations. We were invited there to present our project and the challenges we are facing.  In the conference room, with around 25 persons, split in 4 groups, we did a brainstorming on the four following questions:

• How to reinvest our benefits?
• What business model, and who are our customers?
• How can we share and make use of the data?
• What are the technical issues, and solutions?

We collected some ideas to keep on going with the project.

It was also a good occasion to meet people, who were interested in our project, and who can provide useful information.

After the presentation, we had time to visit the stands of the others exhibitors.

We are in the 5th week, we have now a first sketch of an application interface, in order to manage the loggers and get the data.

We learned how to use Altium, a printed circuit CAD software . Tobia designed an antenna, and built it on a PCB at EPFL-Ecal.lab (picture).    

For the milestone, we had to make a first breadboard prototype (picture). We connected the sensor to a microcontroller, to stream the data of temperature and pressure on a computer. Then, we shown how we can load the data by NFC thank to a smartphone. We left the meeting quite early, to catch a train to G3ID (Geneva Global Goals Innovation Day), explained in a following post.

This is the 4th week. Following the turnaround we got last week, we thought of different concepts and configurations for our device: should it be molded? should it be encased in a metal tube with lids and threads? Each version has its own advantages and disadvantages. Eventually our designer came up with a very interesting idea: using PET preforms to encase the electronic part of the device. Those are cheap, easy to find and resistant! Some renders and sketches are to come soon!

At the same time, we worked on the electronic part as well. We started to design the PCB and to work on the communication system which will be based on NFC (Near Field Communication). We also ordered the different important electrical components we need and started to prepare the first electrical layout on a breadboard for the coming milestone.

See you next week, after the first milestone and the G3ID!

At the beginning of last week, an important meeting with an hydrogeologist of the ICRC led us to change dramatically our former specifications. What the ICRC really wants is a low-cost and robust device, adaptable to any kind of water point and measuring up to 100 meters of water. Regarding data, it seems there was a misunderstanding between our team and the ICRC since the live communication is not needed: a technician will come every 6 months to collect the data, which are aimed at hydrogeologists.

All these information did a pretty huge change in our reflections and our work, since instead of three modules, our goal is henceforth to make one tiny reliable module combining the sensor, a battery and a wireless communication system. In that sense, it might simplify a bit the design process. All the team is reworking on the specifications, the sketches and materials choices and the beginning of the electronic part, which will be presented in two weeks for the first Milestone!

Second and intensive week for our team.

Our main problem for visualizing our ideas was that we do not have a water hand pump. This is why Yohanna and Elise worked on a cardboard model of it, that will be essential in the next weeks.

The engineers – Nicolas, Remi and Tobi – gathered the different technical ideas for solutions and worked on a comparative study, in order to be able to choose one of them, order the components and start working on it as soon as possible.

Additionally, we had the pleasure to meet and skype with several geologists and people working with ground water monitoring on the field, that helped us better defining the objectives and the innovative aspects of our product and our business man Viktor to refine the MVP.