Informatics Cafe - A Taste of Informatics

Norse IoT Club: Making the Future

September 23, 2022 Jonathan Makunga, Nick Klaene, Chris Brewer, Mike Nitardy. Produced and edited by Chris Brewer. Season 2 Episode 6
Informatics Cafe - A Taste of Informatics
Norse IoT Club: Making the Future
Show Notes Transcript

NKU students and faculty advisor chat with Mike about their new Internet of Things club. They discuss learning and inventing in this peer-led maker group where all disciplines partner in creative problem-solving tech projects.

Chris Brewer:

This IoT club, the idea is that students will be able to sort of imagineer their way to solutions to come in and say, "Hey, I'm a biology major", or "I'm studying," you know,"plant sciences or agriculture" or something like that. "And I would love a solution that helps me water my plant on a regular schedule" or get nutrients to it. And that student can join this club. Do they have to have a technical background? Absolutely not. Because we live in a world where a lot of the requirements for technical solutions are being driven by inherently non-technical people.

Mike Nitardy:

That's such a great point.

Chris Brewer:

Right?

Mike Nitardy:

Well, welcome back to the Informatics Cafe. I'm your host, Mike Nitardy. Thanks so much for joining us. And today, we have some honored guests here in the cafe with us to talk about Norse IoT, which is a student club here at NKU dealing with the Internet of Things. And with me, I have two of the students, the founding students and officers of the club. I've got Nick Klaene. He's one of the founding members. He's a student here at NKU and he's also the president of the club. And Jonathan Makunga, who is the vice president of the club, also a founding member, and also a student here at NKU. And with them, we're honored to have the producer of our show, Chris Brewer, who's also the Director of Innovation and Technology at Informatics+ here at Northern Kentucky University. Welcome all of you, it's great to have you.

Nick Klaene:

Thanks for having us.

Mike Nitardy:

Well, this is an exciting area. And I think that the best way to start off is to have somebody just describe what is IoT? What is the internet of things?

Nick Klaene:

You know, when people think of IoT, you know, a lot of times you just think of these little devices, you know, sitting around collecting information everywhere, but I think it encompasses a lot more than that, right? Because you might have some devices, but what are you going to do with those?

Jonathan Makunga:

It is like, utilizing all of the devices, connecting them to internet, and then make those devices smart. So they can you know, accomplish smart stuff. And then we collect those data so we can make better decisions on how those devices could help the users.

Chris Brewer:

You've got IoT devices in your home, for sure. It's your smart thermostat. It's a smart light bulb. It's a smart light switch. It's the traffic light at the crossroads. The

Mike Nitardy:

It's the cameras taking pictures.

Chris Brewer:

It's the cameras taking pictures of you speeding through them! It's ubiquitous,

Nick Klaene:

You can have mobile apps that control those devices, it ties in with the cloud, web, everything. So I think IoT really encompasses everything.

Mike Nitardy:

Everything.

Nick Klaene:

Right? There's information about anything.

Mike Nitardy:

I love that there's information about anything. And so I guess one way of looking at it is is that the IoT is a way to gather that information, collect it, and maybe work with it. So obviously, you all are interested in this area. So interested enough that you wanted to start a club.

Jonathan Makunga:

I think this will be a good idea because that's gonna, first of all, help us to learn more about IoT, and also give other students the opportunity to also learn about IoT, and then, you know, play with the devices and get their hands dirty.

Mike Nitardy:

Get your hands dirty. I like that. That's exactly right. That's one of the best ways of learning is doing. Why don't you give the audience your background for both of you. Jonathan, why don't you start talk a little bit about, you know, what you're studying here at the school and what you hope to accomplish.

Jonathan Makunga:

Yeah, I'm an Information Technology major. And I have a minor in Computer Science. Also, I have another minor in information systems. I'm thinking to get into a software engineer after my my graduation.

Chris Brewer:

And you're graduating when?

Jonathan Makunga:

This May.

Mike Nitardy:

Oh, wow.

Jonathan Makunga:

Yep.

Mike Nitardy:

Fantastic. Yeah, I saw something on the internet on the website, which is a great website, by the way, for Norse IoT, that you're going to be going off to AWS?

Jonathan Makunga:

Yes.

Mike Nitardy:

Very good. Awesome. Awesome. And Nick, what about yourself?

Nick Klaene:

I'm a computer science major. I have a minor in math, but mainly focused on computer science. I'm not particularly interested in math. So yeah, so here at NKU I'm involved with Informatics+. I've been working with Chris for like a year and a half now, pretty much the entire time I've been here. Cool. I'm graduating next year, so not this year, like Jonathan. I am also going to AWS. We're actually both gonna be in Seattle, but I think he's getting there three months after me.

Mike Nitardy:

Nice. Nice. So also in software engineering, is that what you're interested in?

Nick Klaene:

Yes. Yep.

Mike Nitardy:

Obviously, you both described a different major Information Technology for Jonathan computer science. There are some computer science I think that you said minor. But you're both interested in IoT. Do you have to have a certain major or certain background to get involved in IoT?

Jonathan Makunga:

No, no, like, you don't even need a college degree. But all you need is just the will. You have just to have the will to learn. And then that's all you need.

Mike Nitardy:

So there are some interesting pictures on your on your website that looks like that, you know, you can play with anything. You were saying earlier, Nick, that, you know that IoT encompasses everything. So I guess anything that can emit data, or whatever you want to collect, you can connect it to the internet and make it smart. Is that the concept?

Nick Klaene:

Yep. And we were, I remember having a conversation

Jonathan Makunga:

Yes. with Chris about or talking about, like these 1998 Camrys that have like a module on them that are probably $400. And even something like that can kind of be part of the Internet of Things, and connect to the internet. You can make a self driving car, or even if it's not, it's not a Tesla, but it is pretty cool.

Mike Nitardy:

Very cool. So we said earlier, that part of it's going to be about getting your hands dirty. Have you started any projects, any?

Jonathan Makunga:

Yeah, we actually created a people counter device. We have a sensor that will track how many people are entering in a room or getting out of the room. And that's gonna collect those data, and it's stored inside a cloud database,

Chris Brewer:

That project actually came out of a real need. In Informatics+, we have some rooms that are dedicated to student project work. Those rooms are access controlled using your NK ID. Swipe in, you get into the room. But what was happening was that we had no real way to quantify what the actual use was in terms of how many students were actually coming in, because students just like anyone else, tend to prop the door open. hold the door open for a friend. All we were interested in as a unit was being able to justify that that room is serving its purpose and...

Nick Klaene:

We used a LIDAR sensor. And I don't think any of

Mike Nitardy:

Exactly

Chris Brewer:

...is giving value to the students. So I had a personal interest in IoT and thought, well, I have access to you know, this incredible student talent. Why don't we sort of do a little research project on what kind of IoT technology we could assemble to accomplish solving for the goal? What they came up with was this super cool little microcontroller that's network connected and a... What was the sensor that we used? us really knew how that worked before we actually started using it. How many sensors did we use prior to LIDAR?

Nick Klaene:

We used the ultrasonic one. That didn't work too well. What was the other one? There was one more.

Chris Brewer:

I think you did a like a heat sensor. Or maybe it was infrared?

Nick Klaene:

I don't know, it was terrible though. It was not accurate.

Chris Brewer:

And that's kind of the cool thing about IoT as a topic, but also as the club mentality.

Mike Nitardy:

Right. Right.

Chris Brewer:

You asked the question, Who is this for? Do you have to have a technical background in order to do IoT? The club concept gives us the ability to reach out to students across any discipline...

Mike Nitardy:

That's fantastic.

Chris Brewer:

... any skill level, whereas you know, in a typical classroom setting, we have to teach certain concepts before we move on to additional higher level concepts. Right, right, right. In a club, show up, bring your brain and your interest. And let's hack something together now, and in doing so, just learn, you know. So these two fellows, they, they had programming background, but they had no electrical engineering background. They didn't have any experience with sensors or with microcontrollers. They just showed up with their big ol' brains and started hacking away at the problem.

Mike Nitardy:

Wow, that sounds great. That sounds great. So how does someone sign up? How they get involved?

Nick Klaene:

So we have a website at iot.informatics.plus. So you can go on there, you can fill out our contact form. We also have, I think you're can just sign up directly through Presence. It's like NKU's club system. Simple as clicking a button. It's dead simple.

Mike Nitardy:

Do you have set meetings right now that you have? Or is it kind of just ad hoc whenever a need arises, or somebody's got a challenging problem that you're trying to solve?

Jonathan Makunga:

No, as of now, we don't have a setup meeting.

Chris Brewer:

The club is literally brand new. Like I think, maybe two weeks old.

Mike Nitardy:

Oh, wow.

Chris Brewer:

Awesome. We got the approval through the campus to have the student group. And we had nine students sign up overnight.

Mike Nitardy:

Wow.

Chris Brewer:

So there is so much demand and interest in this peer-led...

Mike Nitardy:

Awesome!

Chris Brewer:

...learning environment, you know.

Mike Nitardy:

Yes, that is terrific. That is terrific. Chris, I don't think that I had mentioned this when I described you as the Director of Innovation and Technology and also the producer extraordinaire of this podcast, but you are also the faculty sponsor for this awesome new club.

Chris Brewer:

Yeah.

Mike Nitardy:

And you mentioned the word hack a couple of times. As I understand it, hack doesn't have a negative connotation, actually. I mean, it can in the world, but it's usually trying to figure out answers to problems correct or ..

Chris Brewer:

Yeah.

Mike Nitardy:

Am I on the right track?

Chris Brewer:

Yeah, absolutely. So there's the concept of sort of white hat hacking and black hat hacking.

Mike Nitardy:

Right, exactly.

Chris Brewer:

Those are the two sides of good versus evil sort of scenario. And here with hacking really, what we mean is an unstructured approach where we're looking at stating a problem. What's the problem? Well, the doors are being left open, we don't know how many students are coming into the room. What's a potential solution look like there?

Mike Nitardy:

Exactly.

Chris Brewer:

And keeping it that simple. Like, okay, what do we need to do to solve that? Well, if you boil it down to its most simple state, it's, well, we need to count the people, right? If we literally hired a person to count people coming in the door, and then subtract them as they exit the door. That would be the solution. But we can surely do that with some technology. And so once we have the problem defined, then we just literally attack it and say, well, we need some some sort of counter, some thing that will count. And then we have need to have some thing that will be able to sense bodies passing through the doorframe, for example.

Mike Nitardy:

You can get something that counts and subtracts as people leave, but it could just be counting right there, not connected to anything. The benefit, I guess, of IoT is that it's connected to some other computer so that we've got the data that we're capturing it.

Chris Brewer:

Absolutely. Like we really try and break it down to that obvious of a problem. And then we build a solution around it. And that sort of unstructured hacking — how that took place, literally in our circumstance — was I had some IoT sensors. And I had a couple of microcontrollers. And I threw them out the fellas and said, so I'm going to share with you my knowledge of how to physically connect these together and how to access the various pins and sensors. Have at it.

Mike Nitardy:

Right, right.

Chris Brewer:

And these two fellas went out and did some research on the web and discovered some pretty interesting approaches to how can you track individual bodies moving through a grided laser-ranged rectangle, and came up with a solution. And then they got so full of themselves — which was awesome to see — that they started building a cloud based solution that was would literally allow the data to be captured and forwarded and stored into a database so that that could actually become a reportable event.

Mike Nitardy:

Right. And thank you for getting to that. Because I was going to ask about that second piece.

Chris Brewer:

Right. Well, that built quite a system up there in AWS. And, of course, that's where they're headed off to work. They're using the tools that then turned into their first entry into their careers, which is lovely.

Mike Nitardy:

That's awesome.

Chris Brewer:

Maybe you guys can talk a little bit about what that AWS solution sort of looked like. And yeah, that'd be great.

Jonathan Makunga:

AWS is Amazon Web Service. So that's a, that's like a cloud, there's just another computer out there in this computer, where you can store your information or even build your IT infrastructure. So that's a fancy way of thinking about it.

Nick Klaene:

It's kind of just like renting someone else's computers.

Mike Nitardy:

But really big computers that are all over the place.

Unknown:

And they abstract kind of a lot of the complexities from you. And, there's a lot of services that are really simple to use. Like you don't actually have to get on a computer, configure all this stuff. It's a lot of the time, it's dead simple to set up.

Mike Nitardy:

Very cool. Very cool. So tell us about the solution that you used.

Chris Brewer:

We're using a way overpowered device. It's about the size of my thumb. Costs about eight bucks.

Nick Klaene:

Less than $10.

Jonathan Makunga:

Yeah.

Nick Klaene:

I think you can probably get some for like $4.

Chris Brewer:

the sensors is probably, you know, you can buy sensors for two bucks — ultrasonic sensors or whatever.

Jonathan Makunga:

So the solution we use, in the cloud, we build there is we build a queue.

Nick Klaene:

Kind of a technical term. It's called an MQTT queue. Basically, it just lets the device send some information kind of over the internet in a lightweight way.

Jonathan Makunga:

That queue will be receiving data from the IoT. So the IoT will be sending every data collected into the queue.

Nick Klaene:

On AWS in a queue is just stuff goes in something process it and comes out.

Jonathan Makunga:

I think, every five minutes, I don't know.

Nick Klaene:

I believe the devices are set up to send every five minutes. And when that happens, we just process it and just put it in a database. It's actually not that complex when you really, I guess think about it, but... Yeah, that's the least technical way I guess I could describe it.

Chris Brewer:

That's the beauty of the exercise. Right?

Mike Nitardy:

Right.

Chris Brewer:

The whole idea back to the hacking thing is solutions don't have to be complex to be valuable.

Mike Nitardy:

Right, exactly.

Chris Brewer:

A solution that is valuable is the solution that inherently solves the issue. And does so in a maintainable fashion, low cost fashion, you know, there's those kinds of parameters around it.

Mike Nitardy:

That's fantastic.

Chris Brewer:

And, and to do it in a peer setting.

Mike Nitardy:

Right.

Chris Brewer:

Not in a classroom setting where, you know, you have this sort of set timeframe, you have these set lessons, you have exams and quizzes and assignments. This is much more about being inventive. And being driven by passion to solve a solution.

Mike Nitardy:

That is great. How did how did both of you make your way to NKU?

Jonathan Makunga:

Oh, me. I'm from Africa, Central Africa, and I got here in the US in 2016, July 2016. And two years after that, I got into NKU. So I put my guy into NKU because first of all, is cheaper, and I knew people that were attending NKU. And that's how I got into NKU.

Mike Nitardy:

Did you always have an interest in information technology and computer science.

Jonathan Makunga:

Yes. Growing up, I had the passion of learning about informatic. And yeah, and when I got here, and that was the first thing I was looking into. You know, getting into information technology, and then getting into software development and cybersecurity.

Mike Nitardy:

Fantastic. What about you, Nick?

Nick Klaene:

So I'm from Northern Kentucky originally. So I actually wasn't going to go to NKU. So I was wrapping up high school in 2020. Right when COVID happens. Yeah, and I was gonna go to U of L to do computer engineering and electrical engineering. COVID happened, and I ended up switching to NKU because I had previously taken my entire senior year here at NKU. So I had a lot of courses done, and I liked it. And I don't know if I was planning on staying at first, but I ended up really liking it. And I mean, I was already a full year into a computer science degree. And I always kind of knew I want to do computer science, right? I had, I think I got my first like computer science book, I was like 12. I did not learn it very well. But yeah, I'd always been interested in and I think that originally sparked from being interested in gaming. I remember building like my own computer.

Mike Nitardy:

Wow.

Nick Klaene:

Yeah, computer science, you don't really learn a whole lot about that aspect of it. But that's originally what got me interested.

Mike Nitardy:

Terrific. Terrific. So it sounds like this is obviously been a place where you can take your interests and get involved and turn it into real world experience. Is that Is that accurate?

Jonathan Makunga:

Yes. Yes that's accurate.

Nick Klaene:

Yeah.

Mike Nitardy:

And it also sounds like based upon what Chris said that we've got some other people that are interested in joining you and having some of this fun. Any other thoughts as we get ready to close up here in the in the cafe here today?

Jonathan Makunga:

What I will say is, this is a great opportunity, really to learn about IoT, and also learn about everything that comes with IoT, like networking, database, programming, and even the ability to critically think, you know. Yeah, that's really a great opportunity. So everybody's welcome. We don't really care about your major. No doubt, no doubt, it sounds like a fantastic program that's

Nick Klaene:

I would say, don't be intimidated, if you don't have a technical background, right. A lot of time, someone else has done the hard work for you. Like with our LIDAR sensor solution. I didn't know the first thing about LIDAR. And I didn't have to build like the LIDAR sensor myself, right. Some electrical engineer had already done that. I just had a look at some instructions, connect this to this. Even then, with this club. I mean, as I said, IoT kinda encompasses everything. You don't have to be a computer major to be part of this. You know, Chris mentioned, like a biology major. If you got an interesting project, you have access to a lot of students that are technical. And if you want to learn about some of those skills, so you have access to all these students. So I think it's a great opportunity for anybody at NKU. just now kicking off and congratulations to you both for for starting it. And, and then Chris, for your your involvement as well. And also congratulations to your your work with AWS in the future. Chris, any final thoughts?

Chris Brewer:

Yeah, tons. So, aside from it just being interesting and fun, in my estimation, the level of inventiveness that comes with these super low-cost devices, opens up a world where you can begin to really explore and invent and solve problems on your own.

Mike Nitardy:

Right.

Chris Brewer:

And in doing so, set yourself up for a really rewarding career. You know, as we, as we're seeing here with these two fellows. I'm jealous! I'm jealous and excited. They're so full of life and, and passion and interest and they're heading off into these really great opportunities. And it's because of their commitment to their creative selves.

Mike Nitardy:

Right.

Chris Brewer:

You know?

Mike Nitardy:

Right.

Chris Brewer:

And I think the IoT club hopefully becomes a place where that can happen for a lot more students.

Mike Nitardy:

That is great. Great. Thank you all. appreciate you all coming out to the Informatics Cafe.

Jonathan Makunga:

Thank you.

Chris Brewer:

Thank you, Mike.

Nick Klaene:

Thanks for having us. Informatics Café is presented by Informatics+, the outreach arm of Northern Kentucky University's College of Informatics. Hosted by Mike Nitardy. Produced and edited by Chris Brewer. Music and recording by Aaron Zlatkin. Recorded at the Informatics Audio Studio in Griffin Hall.