News – Page 5 – Thingitude – community led IoT

September 24, 2017September 24, 2017

LoRaWAN for Microbit – the verdict

Many thanks to all of you who took part in our survey, it has been very helpful. Apologies to those who had problems with the survey towards the end of the week – not sure why it started playing up.

I had intended to share the survey results but “free” Survey Monkey has some limitations and annoyingly exporting the results is one of them.

Nevertheless here’s a summary. I have excluded a few responses – A.Penguin from Antartica was a favourite Continue reading “LoRaWAN for Microbit – the verdict”

September 17, 2017September 23, 2017

Who wants a LoRaWAN shield for the micro:bit?

Last year our friend Richard Ibbotson designed a LoRaWAN shield for the BBC micro:bit and they have been used in several experiments and projects since then, including a great project at the Museum of English Rural Life (the MERL) monitoring the impact of environmental conditions on the growth of sugar beet!

Richard’s shield is a popular conversation piece at various meetups and demonstrations. His write-up on hackaday has been read well over 11,000 times and has attracted interest from several organisations.

The shield features include: Continue reading “Who wants a LoRaWAN shield for the micro:bit?”

August 25, 2017August 25, 2017

Thingitude has graduated!

Digital Catapult is a government funded non-profit company that aims to grow the UK economy by encouraging digital innovation in specific areas it has targeted. One such area is the LPWAN technologies that are of growing importance in the Internet of Things.

This year the Catapult ran its first Things Connected innovation programme for startups and SMEs – giving access to their London LoRaWAN network and support in developing products, providing a showcase and introductions to potential clients, partners etc.

Thingitude applied and was accepted onto the programme, and over the first half of the year we developed a method for enabling LoRaWAN solutions to work across multiple networks (write-ups here and here) and got several devices working on The Things Network and Things Connected. Continue reading “Thingitude has graduated!”

March 21, 2017May 3, 2017

Will Smart Cities lead us to Subtopia?

Why you must influence the Smart City agenda where you live

In 1955 critic Ian Nairn wrote a piece for Architecture Review called “Outrage”, in which he coined the term “Subtopia”:

Subtopia is the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern

Nairn was calling for the preservation of characteristic places, fearful that if things were allowed to continue then “…the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton.”

Over 60 years later the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has found that 41% of our town high streets are clones, full of national identikit chain stores and devoid of local character, with another 23% well on their way. Continue reading “Will Smart Cities lead us to Subtopia?”