We caught up with Shah Selbe and Jacob Lewallen the morning after their project, FieldKit, won the Hackaday Prize. FieldKit is an open-source field-based research data collection platform. Which is basically a lot of fancy words for saying it’s a system for collecting sensor data in the field without being snagged by the myriad of problems associated with putting electronics in remote locations. It’s a core project of Conservify, a non-profit organization that seeks to empower conservation research.
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As grand prize winner the FieldKit project was awarded a $125,000 cash prize, which Shah and Jacob say is transformative for a non-profit pursuing technology research and development. It seems the grant process has not evolved to embrace developing electronics, while opportunities for research projects have begun to involve recording large data sets in order to test a hypothesis. This is where FieldKit truly shines. Their vision is to provide a low-cost and extensible system that other researchers can use to collect data while making their own grant dollar go much further.
FieldKit is modular in nature. At the center is the core board that hosts the microcontroller, radio, GPS, and power circuits. Headers connectors allow for a range of sensors and expansion modules to easily be swapped in and out depending on the user’s needs. Currently the team has proven modules for measuring water quality, water level, and weather data. The collected data is stored locally until the user comes around and downloads it to their smartphone by way of the Wi ..
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