We have been implementing Alliot’s LoRaWAN sensors across all our 5G and IoT Testbeds, so it was our pleasure as our new IoT Hardware Partner for Rob to present his vision for IoT hardware and provide insights to the students regarding the use of LoRaWAN sensors and there deployment across differing industry segments.

“We were thrilled to be invited to be a part of the aql hackathon. IoT for many people is still a new concept; events like this play a key role in driving the technology forward and educating others about what is actually possible with the Internet of Things and LoRaWAN. Thank you to the aql team for putting on such a thought provoking, interactive event.”
Rob Ferriday, Business Development Manager, Alliot

With their enormous wealth of data, Dales Land Net explained how their soil moisture monitoring technology informs decisions that protect and help agriculture, livestock, and residents in the Yorkshire Dales. Dalesland Net provided a wealth of sensor readings for the students from across all their rural test locations. 

Visualisation of Dales Land Net soil sensors, these visualisations were built using api.core.al.com 

All the visualisations are available to download from https://github.com/aql-com/iot_event 

“A really interesting event hosted by aql. Lots of networking opportunities and good discussions all around. Above all it’s great to see students getting to grips with aql’s technology and working on real world data. Good luck to them all.”
Neale Hall, Founder, Dales Land Net

Leeds City Council walked the partners and students through how the council are deploying LoRaWAN sensors and technology across the city to aid the utilisation and reporting of Street Lighting, flood alerts and air quality. Leeds City Council provided a selection of indoor and outdoor sensor readings to the students to learn about their local environment and what factors can influence air quality.

“The Hackathon was a great opportunity to share the work that Leeds City Council is doing, and to meet new and existing contacts from the local area.

It’s refreshing to get together in person and share ideas as so much work is done remotely these days.

We were very impressed with the enthusiasm and skills of the young people that attended, and hope that they’re inspired to pursue a career in technology.”
James Glenton, IT Service Transition, Leeds City Council

Visualisation within core.aql.com of one of the Leeds City Council sensors illustrating air quality and temperature

Fyma is a strategic partner of Ingenuity and provides White Rose Park with AI-powered cameras which empower businesses to understand human activity in the physical world, providing occupancy, placemaking space utilisation data, and insights. Fyma provided a month’s set of AI camera readings from across the White Rose Park to aid students and partners in understanding occupancy, as well as people and vehicle flow across that period.  

“It was a pleasure to be a partner for the hackathon event. I really loved the participants’ enthusiasm and insight working with the data provided to them. Alongside us, a range of companies delivered insightful talks on their experiences with IoT technology and data visualisation, providing attendees with a deeper understanding of how this technology can be used.”
Karen Burns, CEO, Fyma

Digital Leaders, a trusted partner of ours for many years, were at the event as attendees to learn about aql’s Core IoT technology and how it was used to enable businesses. 

“The hackathon at White Rose Park was a fantastic event. Companies using IoT for a whole spectrum of use cases presented on their experiences with aql’s Core IoT technology, giving me a great insight into the potential of the platform.” Louise Westcott, Head of Online at Digital Leaders

Following our partner talks, the hackathon half of the event got underway. For this section of the event, over 20 bright and enthusiastic students and their tutors were sent from Leeds City College to take part. The students were split into teams, paired up with our business partners, and given the chance to understand and interact with our mobile network and IoT technology through a wealth of IoT sensor readings from across all our 5G/IoT testbeds. They took part in a variety of challenges from reprogramming our IoT Edge gateways, adding sensors to our LoRaWAN network, and programming widgets to creating custom web parts. 

The work the students completed was an inspiration. We were so pleased to be a part of the exploration of IoT that was undertaken by the students and gave the winning students access to our Core IoT platform and IoT data SIMs allowing access to our mobile network, hopefully inspiring and empowering their further exploration of IoT.

“The presentations gave the students background information on the different sensors. The group activities were well throughout and all students seemed to get involved not only with the task at hand but also with the developers, asking questions throughout the day. The event was very hands on and this is what the students seemed to enjoy the most. It was wonderful to see how all the students engaged as not all students had much knowledge of software development or any programming languages but yet still tried to have a go.” 
Cheryl Macfarlane, Deputy of Apprenticeships and Commercial, Leeds City College

If you’d like to know more about the aql Core IoT platform, follow this link: https://core.aql.com/