CBR lists five IoT monitoring solutions currently seeking seed funding.
Botani.st
Amount sought: £145k
Botani.st is a sensor platform that monitors a plant’s environment and gives feedback about actions that should be taken to optimise growing conditions so that the plant will thrive.
The sensors collect data about soil moisture, air temperature, and ambient light. They then compare the data to that specific plant’s care information from the Botani.st database.
When optimal conditions are not observed, the sensor glows and an alert with details is sent to the gardener via the Botani.st app for iOS and Android or the browser interface.
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It can remind gardeners to water the plant, ask them to move the plant to a sunnier location, or even alert them to bring their plant inside if the temperature outside drops to an unsuitable level.
Founded in 2013, the Swedish company has now launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise fund for the first production of its sensors. The start-up is looking for kr1,700,000 (approximately £145k as of March 24).
Parking monitoring
Amount sought: $2m
Royal Danish Airforce officer and aircraft commander Morten Zillmer, has launched a bid to raise $2m on Indiegogo to develop a system of sensors that will monitor parking lots.
Zillmer says in his bid that drivers need to know with certainty if a spot is empty or not and this can only be achieved with sensors and "only if they are installed both in paid and free parking spots".
His vision is that drivers will pay a small fee "in the order of 50 cents to one dollar", every time they use the sensor information to locate a parking spot. The entire system will be funded by the users.
To work on his idea, Zillmer has contracted with Texas based Chaotic Moon Studios, who work on app development and software/hardware integration.
The goal is to make the system self-sufficient in terms of power by utilising battery power for the sensors and a mix of battery and solar power to drive the network itself.
uRADMonitor
Amount sought: $29k
A pollution monitoring device for cities is what the minds behind uRADMonitor have come up with.
The Romanian start-up is on Indiegogo in a bid to build a device that can detect a wide variety of pollutants, like alpha, beta, gamma and x-ray radiation, volatile organic compounds, potentially lethal gasses like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and others.
The portable solution is expected to be available to every citizen and uses sensors to monitor the above plus temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, dust concentration, pollen, smoke, soot, and volatile organic compounds.
With an embedded colour LCD, the environmental monitor can connect to WiFi networks to gain Internet access and synchronise all measurements with the central server.
An internal alarm is send out audible warning for elevated readings, dangerous for our health. These notifications can also be transmitted automatically via email or sms.
Chipsafer
Amount sought: $170k
Chipsafer is a cattle monitoring platform aimed at easing farmers’ work around their livestock.
The concept of the project is to install a self-recharging device on the animal, either a cow, a sheep, etc, and that device will then send information about that animal to Chipsafer’s server.
The company will then do the analytics and send the harvested information to the farmer who can access it on a laptop or a phone.
Uruguayan Victoria Alonso Perez, the mind behind the idea, says on Indiegogo that through her technology farmers can not only learn where their animals are and receive warnings if an anomaly is detected, but obtain stats about the animals’ performance, helping them to improve herd production and in turn their profits.
"This is of vital importance in poorer communities, as livestock are a key source of income."
The system has also been designed to send out warning messages if the animal passes a specified perimeter or if the device is taken off, in order to prevent the cattle from being stolen.
The company has already tested a prototype in different farms and it is now looking for investment to buy "at least 500 devices" for a larger pilot test.
CubeSat
Amount sought: $5k
CubeSat is not a typical idea for a monitoring IoT tool. The idea behind the small space device is to detect the approximation of UFOs.
CubeSat will capture radiation readings of any object emitting unusual amounts of radiation. The device will incorporate an electro-magnetometer, a scintillation counter and use two cameras wit parabolic lenses.
The eight-member team behind the project is made of software and electronic engineers, satellite UFO researchers, designers, UFO consultants and others.
They have taken to Indiegogo to raise $5,000 to build a 2U CubeSat to search and monitor anomalies in Low Earth Orbit.
The cube-shaped device will be capable of receiving command and transmitting telemetry and mission data down to Earth. CubeSat is being designed to capable of taking images in five second increments.
Experiments include real-time magnetometer observations and geiger counter observations, on-orbit HD image capture of surrounding Low Earth Orbit.
