Enhancing Usability and Expandability of the Open Sensing Platform project

Greetings everyone,

I am Ahmed Falah and I am delighted to be part of the 2024 Google Summer of Code program, where I am contributing to the Open Sensing Platform project.

My proposal was accepted, and I am fortunate to have Colleen Josephson and John Madden as my mentors. The objective of my project is to enhance usability and expandability of the Open Sensing Platform, a hardware solution for deploying sensor networks in outdoor environments. This platform utilizes low-power, long-range communication to transmit data from various sensors to a visualization dashboard. While the platform effectively collects data, its configuration process requires modifying source code to make it more user-friendly. My first steps to enhance usability of the project:

• Improve User Interface (UI): Develop a user-friendly interface to interact with the platform, enabling researchers to configure the device without modifying code.
• Conversion of user configuration: convert user configuration data to the Protobuf format for efficient storage and transmission.

Additionally, I will explore updating the NVRAM functions to interact with Protobuf messages instead of directly writing/reading raw data to NVRAM. I will also implement functions to serialize user configuration data into a Protobuf message and deserialize the message back into a data structure for use within the firmware.

I will be posting regular updates and informative blogs throughout the summer, so stay tuned!