Overview
Hummingbird is a hardware scheme designed to interface with a free VivaPlanet (http://www.vivaplanet.io/) data-analysis engine. Hummingbird will send information about the health of it's environment to the VivaPlanet data-analysis engine to allow the user to predict and better understand the health of the environment of Hummingbird. Anyone can use an ethernet, GPRS or WiFi enabled Internet of Things or wearable device to interface with the VivaPlanet data analysis engine. These are the instructions on how to build a simple serial interface to this engine.
There are three major parts to this project. There is the free VivaPlanet data-analysis engine, the coordinator node and the sensor node. The senor node(s) send information to the coordinator node. The coordinator node manages inputs from various sensor nodes and sends this data periodically to VivaPlanet. The user can then go look at the big data analytics on their free VivaPlanet website.
We chose GHI (https://www.ghielectronics.com/) and Seeed (https://www.http://seeedstudio.com) to purchase a lot of the hardware. GHI uses .NETMF capable hardware which is great. I'm using .NetMF 4.2 for this project.This means I can write embedded code in C# and have it compile and run on the GHI hardware. This is really great because I get all of the power and flexibility of C# when coding. There is some overhead in this on the hardware side but for a light weight application like this it is a really great way to quickly prototype.