We went to Gambang, Malaysia and built a smart city out of Lego (before Covid-19 stopped us)

Smart city development in progress

In February and March 2020 we delivered our flagship six week training programme at UMP in Gambang, Malaysia, under our Lab 4.0 brand. Well that was the idea, anyway...

Our group of thirty students (which included some post-grad students and lecturers) were awesome. Faced with a lot of topics that they were unfamiliar with, they rose to the challenge and surprised us with what they were able to achieve.

Our six-week programme covers a lot of ground. Of course there are many technical tasks to complete, but equally important are the other skills that students have to exercise along the way- teamwork and collaboration, presentation skills, creativity- all skills that are essential for the future.

There are a lot of topics on the course- for a complete agenda, get in touch with us at contact@profoundsource.co.uk- along the way each group of students builds a tabletop model of a smart city (using Lego as a building material) packed with technology- sensors, microcontrollers, gateways- which sends data from the model to the cloud, and creates interfaces to the cloud data that are then used to create an augmented reality user interface (built using Unity and Vuforia) and an Alexa skill so that citizens of the model smart city can get data from the city in various ways.

Things were going smoothly until the university was closed because of the Covid-19 virus. This happened very quickly and we were left with very little time to pack everything up and leave our lab which had been our home for a month. Fortunately, our students helped us and we were able to get everything packed up super quick.

It was a shame to leave the course unfinished, but the safety of our students is our (and the university's) number one priority. Overall it was a great experience and when the world is back to normal we can't wait for the next one.

Some pictures from the event...

The famous spaghetti challenge, a great warm-up task

Getting to grips with some electronics

Each group of students manages a smart city block packed with technology

Sometimes the best way to test a piece of technology is to hit it with a hammer

A wind turbine with a controller that measures rotation and sends the data back to a gateway

Meeting Alexa

Developing skills for Alexa that will interface with the smart city

A wearable product in development

Collaborating to solve problems

Demonstrating a project

Behind the scenes of the smart car park

Throughout the course students make presentations on a number of different topics

Greeting our guest, Dr Raslan of MiGHT

Students demonstrate aspects of the smart city model

Explaining the smart city's waste management system- the bins tell the trucks when they are full

Sniffing some Bluetooth

Monitoring the environment in the model smart city

Meeting Nao

An augmented reality exercise. Is that a dragon sitting on your phone?

Scrum day- the Lego Scrum challenge