News--Welcome to National Chiayi University

　　Jointly advised by Prof. Chyung Ay, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Prof. Yang Zhao-Wang from the Department of Biomechatronic Engineering Associate, National Chiayi University, first-year graduate student Fu Guan-Han and senior students Tang Yun-Xiang and Deng Xiang-Guan were presented Techno-savvy Enterprise Award at “Cross-Strait Youth Maker Competition 2017” with their work “Application of LoRa Technology for the Internet of Things in Intelligent Aquatic Products.” In its second edition, the competition was organized by Tongji University, Shanghai.

　　Prof. Ay indicated that the research was mostly applicable in the realm of fish farming. Given the fact that fish farms are largely located in remote areas, the cost of installing internet-based monitoring systems there is relatively high. There are also more limitations regarding equipment deployment. Moreover, fish farmers might suffer extra loss if issues such as stealing events, equipment failure and timely environmental information fail to be timely detected.

　　According to Prof. Ay, their work employed LoRa as a basis for wireless transmission. It is a long-range, low-power wireless communications equipment developed only two years ago, whose transmission distance can reach up to 15 to 20 km. They also modularized the sensing equipment, actuating equipment and master control equipment for data collection. Meanwhile, they integrated a network-attached storage (NAS) device as a collective private cloud. A user interface was also specially designed to allow fish farmers to instantly access environmental information, including values of pH, EC, and ORP, water temperature, light intensity, and equipment operation status, with a view to preventing unnecessary extra loss.

　　According to NCYU, to join this edition of competition, registration must be completed online or in-person at the location designated by the organizer. All the participants needed to submit proposals for their works, which were later screened by the judging panel. The process of proposal submission and review took a total of three months. A total of 368 participants from 13 cities across the Strait joined the competition. The final round was carried out in the highly competitive “48-Hour Maker Marathon,” in which all the participants needed to bring the prototype into practice based on the proposal within 48 hours. All their works must integrate hardware and software design. Only highly effective division of work and collaboration would enable the participating teams to submit design projects or products of practical values within limited time. It not only involved designing and constructing their hardware device, but also developing, testing and integrating the software. Thus, it required a lot of hard work to win the awards.