Submission

BokBot

Protecting backyard dinosaurs by automating and monitoring a chicken coop with technology.
https://bokbot.org/
https://bokbot.com/

Technology
Education
Clean Energy
Health
Public Safety

We will educate people in the use of technology to produce food hyper locally (at home). Food is energy for our bodies, producing this locally reduces energy usage in many other areas as well. By reducing the dependency on the store, distributor, and farmers, you also cut out the transportation and waste between each node. The food is made and consumed locally reducing the overhead on the entire supply chain. When food is produced locally diseases are not transported to unnaturally large areas. Chickens are not as prone to develop the dangerous diseases when they are not kept together in massive chicken farms. Another component of our system is surveillance through cameras, microphones, motion detectors and other threat recognition sensors which can be fed into openCV to identify and perhaps even react to threats. For example, if motion is detected at night, the lights would automatically be turned on, thwarting many nocturnal predators immediately. This also illuminates the subject for the cameras to capture many images that can be sent off to the cloud to be analyzed so the threat can inventoried and sent to human caretakers in the morning and can also contribute to machine learning so the system is better able to recognize threats as the project develops a deeper dataset. After further threat detection systems are triggered, other forms of defense can also be initiated, such as the sound of a barking dog or even launching an autonomous reconnaissance drove.

We begin with static html, move as fast as possible to get things started, then move to static html generated by templates, and then add oauth for authorization and javascript plus microservice backends for dynamic content. This achieves near zero latency, that not only outstrips the old model, but provides all the smart features and easy to use UI that people have come to expect across all platforms. This means everything should start browser first, react to viewport size, then we only have cater to the individual tweaks necessary to port the app into other platforms using one of the great open source frameworks that allow you to port html5 + javascript to the various mobile platforms as 'native apps'. Lastly most of the analysis, machine learning, and visualization of data can be done externally in the cloud. By utilizing the combined image analysis and other threat detection across many coops we ought to be able to identify threats and other bad conditions with increasing accuracy.

JVL and Josh run the http://webhosting.coop/ as well, and understand many of the pitfalls of the old models of software. Combined we have decades of experience working with software development teams, both as developers and leaders. We have a Gitlab instance setup for code collaboration:
https://gitlab.webhosting.coop/
and a corresponding mattermost instance for real time collaboration via chat:
https://mattermost.webhosting.coop/
Mattermost is a self hosted clone of slack which has the added benefit that we aren't prone to the limitations seen with slack (we can have as many users and integrations as desired). Recently, we took this setup to the ATXhack4change at St. Edwards University: http://atxhackforchange.org/

At ATXhack4change, we added many people to the team, some people we knew already,and more importantly, some additional talented friends, rounding out our team even further.

Resulting in: https://gitlab.webhosting.coop/groups/bokbot/group_members

We hacked away over the weekend and ended up winning the 'Most Austin Project" award!

We have both bokbot.com and bokbot.org. The bokbot.org site will always contain all the code necessary for users to build their own automated coop, all repos are publicly available at https://gitlab.webhosting.coop/bokbot/ and https://github.com/bokbot and will remain free and open source.

In addition to this, once we get up and going we want to have community outreach meetups and help people hack their own pre-existing coops, and perhaps hold events where people help build community coops, much like the community gardens you see everywhere in Austin.

Building prototypes, and getting them in the hands of Callahan's, Buckmoor Feed, and other Austin area feed stores so we can start building a user base and seeing how much data we can get them to upload data and feedback to us. Furthermore, we'd like to work with the City of Austin and get a number of community coops operational with participation from nearby elementary schools, in turn educating the children about the benefits of composting, producing food locally, and some general agricultural skills that many urban children are not exposed to. We'd also like to pay any legal fees necessary to get the Bokbot.org developed into a 501c3 non-profit organization whose primary purpose would be to foster the open source codebase, and to promote the community around it through educational efforts like the above community coops and other educational outreach programs.