Lions Gate Smart Garden
The Lions’ Gate is an imaginative, urban, permaculture habitat based at Edinburgh Napier University’s Merchiston Campus providing garden, allotment, outdoor laboratory, venue, performance, re-wilding, and relaxation space. The Smart Garden project aims to embed sensors into the garden environment to monitor environmental factors and to model their relationships with the flora and fauna.
In the first stage of the Smart Garden development, a series of sensor nodes will be installed that use LoRa to communicate their data to a gateway device based on a Raspberry Pi. From there, the data will be sent over the University WiFi network to a web app for storage and visualisation. The diagram below summarises the architecture.
Stage 1 will be completed before the end of 2021. The web visualisations on their own will provide a new way of looking at the garden and its planting, while the raw data will be used for technical modelling of the ecosystem.