I want to share with you the results of our educational program for universities "Samsung IT Academy" on the Internet of things. The annual inter-university final of the Internet of Things project competition is the culmination of the school year and was held for the second time. In total, 12 projects were presented in the nominations “Research” and “Business and Society”. It is pleasant to note that the training course of the IT Academy and the exit competition give projects that are practically applicable in real life.

This year, students from 7 leading Russian universities participated in the finals. Students of SUSU (Chelyabinsk) showed excellent results, all the main awards went there. The guys from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and International Engineering and Technology Institute (university-winner last year and the largest graduation in the number of students) showed a traditionally high level. And finally, the projects of students from NSTU (Novosibirsk) were also noted at the end. Other finalists include students from the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg State University, TUSUR (Tomsk).

But first of all, I want to determine what we, the educational project team of Samsung Research Center, mean by the Internet of things. What can a student do if he has the right course and competent scientific guidance? What training equipment is currently suitable?

The Internet of things is a way of combining disparate "smart" devices (things) into a single network, and establishing interaction between these things so as to ultimately receive a new benefit / service.

Usually on the Internet of things 4 types of systems are considered, hierarchically arranged in complexity, where each subsequent level includes the previous ones:

Monitoring only
Monitoring + Management
Optimization
Autonomous control

For obvious reasons, the majority of Samsung IT Academy student projects presented at the final of the IoT training track competition were from the simplest category “Monitoring”. In addition to the need to navigate in a wide range of technologies, students were given 1 semester for the project with the remaining load in other disciplines. In addition, most students carried out projects individually, and to implement systems of level 2 and above is, of course, a task for a whole team of developers.

The competition was held in two rounds. The 12 best projects were selected for the final, their authors, graduates of the Academy, were invited to Moscow, where they presented their developments to the jury.

Jury

The jury included Russian experts from the Moscow Samsung Research Center, as well as representatives of other companies:

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From left to right: Tatyana Volkova, Stanislav Polonsky, Igor Ezhkov, Vyacheslav Garbuzov, Alexey Kornilov

According to the participants of the contest, the most difficult questions were from Alexey Vadimovich Kornilov, member of the advisory board of the Interuniversity program on technological entrepreneurship, the author of the training course on the design of Internet of things systems, organizer the first in Russia robotic competitions when it was not yet mainstream. He directly pulled the soul out of the contestants, asking uncomfortable questions: “What is the product?” or "How do you see the monetization of your project?"

Who is the client? .. And where do you see the boundaries of the system? .. How are you going to scale the project? ...

One student said: “I liked the fact that we were criticized. Usually it happens: you come to a hackathon, you program something, you get a prize, and then you think like that - and what was it? .. "

Who won

The absolute winner was Sergey Kuznetsov (SUSU) and his project “Monitoring the state of pipeline insulation”.

In this work, the insulation resistance of the pipeline is measured, and on the basis of this, conclusions are drawn about damage and the need for repair. Work with a very simple, understandable practical meaning.

To understand the essence of the project, watch Sergey’s video:

Separately, the loop resistance and insulation resistance are measured:

The case of the device looks like this:

Inside it looks like this:

System architecture:

Iron used in the project: STM32F103 microcontroller, RAK811 LoRa module, Vega LoRaWAN base station (manufactured in Novosibirsk). Software: Vega IoT server, PostgreSQL, Tibbo Aggregate application server.

Nomination "Business and Society"

1st place - Dmitry Karmanov (MIPT) with the project "Remote Access Controller REMAC"

Dmitry is just a super student. Not only did he graduate from the FALT MIPT with honors - anyone who knows the level of education at Fiztekh will understand what efforts are needed for this - he is also interested in creating his own electronic devices, leads a YouTube channel about it to 13 thousand subscribers and plays on electric guitar.

REMAC is a completely ready-made device for remote control of a computer in a flash drive form factor, which has been tested for 3 months. Many guests of the finals of the contest noted that they were ready to purchase such a device, as it is really necessary.

The case of using such a device: if you went on a business trip, and suddenly you needed to turn on the computer remotely so that your office colleague could get the file you need from there. Surely one of the readers had such a phobia when traveling on a business trip: “I suddenly forget to copy the presentation, and I have to ask someone to log into my computer ...” It’s completely unsafe! And here it will be: REMAC itself enters the password that you saved in the system, and you communicate with this device over the Internet: it connects via WiFi to the router. You can start a remote communication session with your computer and send yourself this file by mail. And now, due to the transition of many companies to the remote mode of operation, this is becoming even more relevant.

Personally, I was struck by the level of performance of the device. Everything has been done very competently and at a high level:

Used technologies: ESP8266 WiFi chip (800 lines of code) and STM32F070F6P6 microcontroller (500 lines of code). The board was made in the Altium Designer editor.

Video about the device:

It is always interesting how the fate of projects subsequently develops. I contacted Dima just the other day, and here is what he said: “Since the end of the Samsung contest, I debugged some bugs in the firmware - identified during use and updated the functionality a bit. I did not do anything cardinal in terms of improvements. However, at this stage, I spend a lot of time studying the features of PCB manufacturing with installation in China, correspond with the engineers of JLCPCB, PCBWAY, agree on the documentation and materials for the production. Now, in addition to REMAC, I am preparing 4 more devices for production, a small batch of one of them has already been ordered. So far, all this is at the experimental level, but with the ultimate goal of turning a hobby into a business of its own. In general, I understand the intricacies of the production of small series and at the same time I study the features of opening IP, accounting for the simplified tax system, etc.P."

2nd place - Sergey Antonov (SUSU) with the project “Thermal energy metering system”

Sergey took a well-known device for measuring thermal energy - the VKT-7 heat meter of the Teplocom company, and added something new to it - wireless communication using the LoRaWAN protocol - before that, all devices were connected via the old-school RS-232. Any engineer knows how difficult it is sometimes to deal with a new device, protocol, solution. Sometimes you just want to say: “Better do mine!” Therefore, the value of this work lies in the proposal of an integrated solution. You can read more about this task in a post by Oleg Plotnikov from Intersvyaz, an industrial partner of this project.

The device for collecting and transmitting data from the heat meter turned out like this: a debugging board based on the STM32F103 microcontroller, a UART-RS-232 interface converter and a LoRaWAN RAK811 transceiver.

And the whole system as a whole is like this:

In addition to the heat meter mentioned above, the LoRaWAN Vega base station and the LERS cloud server are used here (stands for Energy Saving Laboratory, the company is located in Khabarovsk), PostgreSQL and MS SQL servers.

System operation video:

Sergei’s future plans include the creation of an industrial design of USPD, expanding the list of supported heat meters, and expanding the ASKUTE to the ASKUER.

3rd place - Borzykh Nikita (MIREA) with the project “Information-analytical system for calculating passenger flow”

Everyone knows applications such as Yandex. Transport ”, showing the positions of buses and trams. But here's the bad luck: we still don't know the traffic load.

In Moscow and other large cities, where fare is paid using electronic cards only, passenger flow can be considered payment transactions. But the problem is that passengers pay at the entrance, and where and how many of them came out is unknown. It turns out that we do not have accurate information on how many passengers are currently traveling: maybe the bus is jam-packed, or maybe it is empty? On which sections of the route what loading?

For passengers and for the development of various urban systems in general, such information can be very useful.

It is proposed to solve this problem in the project of Nikita Borzykh from MIREA. A prototype of the device was presented at the competition, which looked like a frame, and in the demo zone anyone passing through could check its operation (or how it was counted :)).

See the demo of the system:

Nikita solved the problem in different ways, conducted experiments: with a video camera, as well as with ultrasonic sensors on the frame. The result was a rather cumbersome system. But I liked the approach itself - competent testing of various options and a report on the results.

The project was made on the following tools: Raspberry Pi 3, webcam, GPS tracker, STM32 microcontroller, ESP8266 WiFi chip, infrared and ultrasonic sensors, Docker container, Java server, Angular JS frontend, PostgreSQL.

Nomination "Research"

1st place - Maxim Volkov (MIREA) with the project “Food Freshness Control System in the Refrigerator”

This project was done in partnership with EISLab, a Russian company for the production of gas sensors from Dzerzhinsk (Nizhny Novgorod Region). The company develops gas sensors for environmental monitoring of large industrial enterprises.

The Samsung Research Center open innovation group has proposed a different scenario for using a sensor - to control the level of ammonia in refrigerators: ammonia is released during the decomposition of protein bodies and can serve as an indicator of the presence of spoiled products. EISLab has not been optimized for this task. The system needed refinement, but for such a refinement the company had neither competencies nor resources. We decided to discuss this problem with interested partners of the IT Academy, the teachers proposed the candidate of MIREA, who was studying at the course of the Internet of things, who became interested in this task.

The first communication was extremely difficult, the view on the problem of startups and universities did not intersect, it even sometimes seemed that it was in vain. However, after the next round of discussion of the problem, a unifying point of view was found that corresponded to the Win-Win strategy. Each in this process had to get something of his own, valuable specifically for him, and solve his pressing practical problems.

The university got access to the latest sensor, capable of showing real values of the ammonia content in the atmosphere, and the opportunity to work out its solution on a practical task. The company got the opportunity not only to test the sensor for a fundamentally different use-case than it had used before, namely for household appliances, but also to do it with the efforts of a Samsung partner with the required competencies, with a minimum of effort.

The objective of this pilot project was formulated as follows: Combine the sensor with a microcontroller capable of transmitting data to the client via WiFi - to make a minimum MVP. The fact that WiFi can transfer data from inside the refrigerator has been verified first. And then it was necessary to conduct research - to calibrate the readings of the sensor and in general to understand how it is able to catch spoilage of products in low temperature conditions.

The sensor is this metal cylinder. Maxim made a case for him.

A simple but working system based on the ESP8266 was made. After preliminary measurements, it turned out that the accuracy of the ADC built into the sensor is not enough, it was decided to connect an external ADC ADS1115. According to the chosen concept, the data was sent to the IBM Cloud. If the ammonia level exceeded a predetermined threshold value, the user received a notification about spoilage of products in the refrigerator through the VK bot.

After the readings of the sensors were obtained, it turned out that signal processing is the most difficult task in this project. Most of the time and effort was spent on learning how to interpret the data coming from the sensor. Therefore, the project from the engineering and IT plane smoothly moved into the form of research work.

Nomination “Teacher of the Year”

The winner in this nomination was Yevgeny A. Kanashev, lecturer at the Department of Automation and Control, Higher School of Electronics and Computer Science, SUSU (Chelyabinsk).

Here a few words should be said why it was decided to award him the victory in this nomination. From our very first meeting on Skype, a very useful dialogue was built: the entire academic year, the team of educational projects of the Samsung Research Center received from him active feedback, bug fixes, tips, suggestions, ideas. And it was he who was the supervisor of three strong projects of SUSU, which reached the final, and, as we wrote, two of his students became winners of the competition.

Below is an excerpt from an interview with Eugene Alexandrovich, taken after the competition:

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Sergey Kuznetsov, the winner of the competition - in a natural environment for himself

- Of course, such works have the prospect of implementation, another thing is that they are not in a pure form. During the defense of the projects, representatives of Intersvyaz company were present at SUSU, in particular, the director of the Center for Industrial Internet Oleg Plotnikov, who said that they had exactly the same work, and therefore they were ready to take the guys to work right now.

Other projects presented in the final of the competition

Of no less interest are other projects presented in the final of the competition. Below is their brief overview:

Kontsov Artyom, Denis Kudryavtsev (TUSUR), Easy Parking project

When the selection jury got acquainted with the Easy Parking project, they all unanimously said: this is an urgent problem! Judge for yourself. Finding a parking spot is a big headache for drivers in many cities. Students demonstrated a solution using computer vision technology that would help the driver search for free parking.

The guys demonstrated their technical competence. In the future, it is necessary to more thoroughly study the implementation and operation of the system in the proposed application scenario. For example, who can be the buyer of such a system and how will the issue of installing cameras on other people's buildings be decided? Also, it is necessary to solve the optimization problem.

Just the bot in the Telegram was chosen as the interface

Alexander Karaush (NSTU), project “Competitive game with physical activity”

This project won the vote of audience sympathy. A small and fairly simple game controller with an accelerometer is a very budget version of the Nintendo Wii. Built into a stuffed toy, it fits in your pocket and your child can play a useful sports game.

Video example:

Perhaps the decisive role in the vote was played by the fact that Alexander made this toy for a reason, and for his younger sister, and the game itself is very beautiful and bright. A good example of a small but fully finished training project.

Among the shortcomings of the project: the connection to the game was decided without the use of standard gaming APIs, that is, the possibilities of expanding the project were limited only by the efforts of Alexander himself as the developer of the game. It would be interesting to see other games with this controller (for example, the same Flappy Bird).

Alexander holds in his hands that same yellow controller toy

Pivko Artyom, Bobkov Ivan, Denisova Maria (HSE), Smart Campus project

A year ago, HSE professor at MIEM HSE spoke about the idea of the Smart Campus student project. A year later, this project was implemented by a team of HSE students.
The project is a carefully recreated 3D model of the MIEM training building, through which you can "fly" in VR and watch the readings of sensors laid out across the building. The project was distinguished by technical solutions, being declared as a training stand. In addition to the solution itself - a complex hardware-software complex, the project team provided an impressive package of documentation - this is very important, because often programmers do not have enough time for this.

In the future, the authors of the project need to work out and training use cases.

Artyom Pivko shows a “flight” through a virtual building with spaced sensors

Smart Campus Architecture and Technologies Used

Konstantin Morozov (NSTU), the project "Chip Account"

Not everyone knows that tiny SMD components for surface mounting can be counted out automatically - there are special holes on the tape that are used in industrial production. Konstantin decided to make life easier for those who need to use components on SMD tapes on the scale of small-scale production by developing a cheap and simple Chipo account device.

The main use case is the use of a Chip Account in a warehouse / store to identify components by RFID tag and automate component counting on SMD tapes. This will undoubtedly improve the efficiency of personnel when working with such specific products. Konstantin sees the development of the project in the automation of data transfer from the device to accounting programs or software for the development of Altium and others. Separately, I want to note the laconic design and convenient graphic display. Very nice and finished project.

Watch the video about the project:

Dmitry Selivanov, Ekaterina Pavlova, Mikhail Petrov (St. Petersburg State University), ChainBox project

Last year, the Center for Distributed Register Technologies was opened in St. Petersburg, and the SPbU student project was made on the basis of this center. ChainBox is both a smart seal for a ship container and a smart suitcase tag. The project uses blockchain technology - and this immediately sparked discussion and debate on an eternal (well, as eternal, already 10 years old) ongoing topic - is blockchain needed in this project? .. If we leave this issue aside, it should be noted that The prototype was made correctly - it is a snap seal in a housing with a battery, its energy consumption is calculated, it is nice to pick it up. Hyperledger Iroha

Distributed Registryused here to store container data. It stores the history of events of the form [time, location, status of the castle, owner of the container], as well as the current status of the order, ID of the current customer, ID of the supplier and NFC-key for opening the lock. Changes to the distributed registry are made using transactions. They are produced either by the container itself - when opening through NFC and when adding records containing information about the location of the container. Or they are made through a web interface by users: customers and suppliers when opening / closing a lock and changing container information.

ChainBox Result: GPS Tracking

Alexey Latysh (NSTU), the Smart Shelf project

The Smart Shelf, as planned, helps to weigh and immediately save anything in the database: be it cereals, radio parts or nuts. This is definitely one of the favorites in the “best prototype” group. The body and engraving are independently made, moreover, accurately and efficiently.

And I remembered how I worked at a radio parts warehouse for some time. There was exactly such a need: to count small components by hand for a long time, it is easier to weigh on an electronic scale, and the error is not so critical if the parts are inexpensive. So there we had ordinary electronic scales, not “smart”, we had to add everything to the database manually. So personally, Alexey’s project is close and clear to me.

Video demonstration of the project:

Alexey developed a web user interface for Vue.JS, a new framework for himself, and the server part in Java using the Spring framework (boot, security, jpa, etc.) + WebSocket (SockJS + Stomp).

Danil Salov (SUSU), project “Self-diagnosis of pressure sensor”

A smart sensor is not only the one that gives the testimony in time, but can also inform about its malfunction, periodically conducting self-diagnosis sessions.

Pressure sensor and piezoceramic ring The

self-diagnosis of the pressure sensor in general is as follows: applying a voltage pulse to the piezoceramic ring, analyzing the output signal, determining the natural frequencies of the oscillations, comparing the reference frequencies with the received ones, and determining the state.

The project was carried out as part of the “Research” nomination, because Danil studied and applied the matrix beam method to estimate signal parameters, and generally figured out how such problems are solved. The project was made in the framework of cooperation with the Scientific and Research Laboratory of Technical Self-Diagnostics and Self-Monitoring of Devices and Systems, opened at SUSU.

The following technologies were used in the project:

Danil spoke succinctly about his impressions and gained experience: "Programmed, soldered, read articles."

Conclusion

These were our projects. Compared to last year , the progress is tremendous, which, first of all, is the merit of teachers. The role of the supervisor in the design activities of students is priceless. The experience gained during the first pilot year of the program benefited. For our part, we highlighted important points for a successful educational process and tried to help our partner universities.

Everyone who defended the dissertation knows that the most difficult part is not the defense itself, but pre-defense: all battles usually take place on it. We did something similar, my colleague Anatoly and I attended all the pre-defenses and already at the early stage conducted project reviews and tried to help students: someone was told the opportunity for improvement, highlighted the project’s weaknesses, and somewhere there were even situations when I had to explain that the project in the current setting does not fit the requirements for obtaining the Samsung Academy IT Graduate Certificate. The fall 2019 competition highlighted the next challenges that we are solving in the current school year, the process of improving our training course on the Internet of Things continues, and this, I think, is great.

In the fall of 2020, the final stage of the Samsung IT Academy project competition will be held for the third time. For the first time, the jury will be presented not only projects on the educational track “Internet of Things”, but also on two new training tracks: “Artificial Intelligence” and “Mobile Development”. The number of partner universities of the project is growing. There will be more competitors, the struggle and intrigue will intensify!

In conclusion - a short video about our competition:

And a video with an overview of the best moments of the reports of the winners of the competition:

And the last one. If you have ideas of interesting projects that would be feasible for students of conditionally 3 courses of a technical university, and you are ready to share them - write in the comments or in a personal email or to us . Some of our students may like your ideas, and they will be brought to their prototype. And if you are ready to become mentors in the implementation of your ideas, this will give students even more opportunities.

We also invite organizations to cooperate and will try to support not only your projects, but also other tasks. For example, recently Samsung IT Academy, together with MTS, were partners of the training hackathonconducted at the radio faculty of UrFU. Two street lighting lamps equipped with NB-IoT network were proposed as a control object. As a result, the “smart lamp” sent data to the MTS cloud platform and everyone saw how information on the voltage, power, and lamp status appears on the graph. The RTF teacher Aleksey Prisyazhny, the RTF teacher, made the remote control for this lamp right on the spot, from improvised materials. As the representative of MTS Igor Gennadevich Ezhkov said, this was the first lamp in the Sverdlovsk region, connected via NB-IoT.

Among our partner universities on the IoT track, there are currently 16 universities from all over Russia, with different specializations, including information security (TUSUR), industrial automation (SUSU). Also, among the students of the Samsung Samsung IT Academy there are students of an agricultural university (VolSAU) and students of mathematics-programmers (St. Petersburg State University).

Write, we are open to communication!

Tatyana Volkova - The author of the training program on the Internet of Things track “Samsung IT Academy”, a specialist in corporate social responsibility programs at Samsung Research Center

2019 Student IoT Projects Competition: Severe Chelyabinsk Internet of Things Collected All Awards