A competition that involved 26 hours of non-stop programming, Smart India Hackathon 2017 saw 1,266 teams from across India offer digital, sustainable and innovative solutions to solve real-time problems that beset the nation. The finale, held on April 1 and 2, saw the teams compete simultaneously from 26 locations.
One of the locations was Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore. Students from different parts of the country gathered to find solutions to the problems offered by various ministries. Here’s what some of them had to say:
Deepesh Gupta, DBIT Vikings team, Don Bosco Institute of Technology, Bengaluru
Project: Evaluation of Health Hazards and management of electronic wastes
The Hackathon taught us not to just offer a solution but also to design and implement it in a limited timeframe.
The solution involves three levels — user, collector and recycler — and the technology involves android and web applications. The user level has features like request to recycle waste and learning about hazardous nature of e-waste. The collector is a public/private body that regulates proper collection of e-waste. Here, the web interface is for the authority to regulate request handling and schedule collection.
The manual collectors, who are responsible for collecting e-waste from the user, have the android application to assign a unique barcode to each product. The recycler disposes the waste safely and also ensures proper tracking of the recycled, reused and disposed constituents.
Dilshad Ahmad, Dreamers team, Maharastra Academy of Engineering and Educational Research, Pune
Project: Evaluation of the pollution and pressure on wetlands and other water bodies and their conservation
We got lots of inputs from experts, which we used in the final product. Our team was divided into three groups and the work was allotted according to their specialisation. Our solution was to monitor the different parameters via a node placed near the outlet pipes. The data is then sent to the municipal corporation or relevant authority via an Android app, SMS or email. It can also be uploaded on social media so that activists can access it. There will be a special notification if the reading shows a sudden change. This way the authorities will know exactly who is responsible for the abnormal reading.
Pranav Paraksh, Tech Samaritan team, Maharastra Academy of Engineering and Educational Research, Pune
Project: Water usage audit for smart India
Starting from scratch and making a working product is extremely hard, but, when helped by a great team and mentor, it can be a cake-walk. We created an end-to-end product that uses IoT platform to monitor water consumption from various sources such as ground water, corporation water and water conserved from rainwater harvesting. Water consumption was calculated using a controller and sensors for incoming flow and for overhead tanks. We created a web app that can be accessed by the authority as well as individual consumers to generate smart reports for users.
As a result, the local authority gets an overall view of water consumption in that region. A chatbot based on ZeroUI concept provides users with daily usage statements and controlling water motor driver. We also performed predictive analysis for understanding its future use in various regions and Smart Water Billing System so that each user can pay bills and taxes online.
Arpit Nandi, Quarks and Leptons team, Shri S’ad Vidya Mandal Institute of Technology, Gujarat
Project: Air quality monitoring system
We got to learn a lot from the expert input sessions, and the judges’ feedback helped improve not only our project but also our presentation skills. Our project was to develop a device that would help monitor and supervise air in real-time. So we designed a cost-effective, low power, scalable, remotely operating IoT-based device. The design can be implemented for household and industrial purposes as well. We have added functionalities to send notifications via mail or SMS to the user in case some target gases exceed limits. We hope it will be implemented on a large scale.
Sreenivasan P., Technofreak team, Sri Krishna College of Technology, Coimbatore
Project: Spoofed email with swapped email ID (and IP too) can come to a user’s inbox. Suggest a mechanism to filter the spoofed email on the server side
This was a great platform to showcase our talent and innovative ideas. We also realised what the industry is looking for and how we have to approach or engage with it. Our solution consisted of a unique algorithm (Smart India Mailet) along with the standard algorithms used by mail server. This proposed algorithm blocks the spoofed mails in the receiver server and prevents it from entering the receiver’s mailbox. It also sends an alert to the server’s authorised admin.
