On the weekend of May 3–4 at Impact Hub Firenze, fifteen volunteer programmers divided into three working groups took part in a 48-hour ‘hackathon’ to develop software that will make a difference in the lives of 2,000 victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. The event was organized by Off Grid Box for the global humanitarian aid group Oxfam, in collaboration with the local coworking space Impact Hub and Fablab Firenze.
Off Grid Box is a one-square-meter container capable of providing purified drinking water, warm clean water for washing, rainwater for agriculture, solar energy and, in some versions, also hydrogen gas. This sustainable self-sufficiency project was developed by a team of 30-something engineers from Arezzo and was selected for and presented at Expo Shanghai and Venice Biennale. While the box can be used to power a home anywhere in the world, it is particularly well-suited to emergency situations and developing nations.
Three Off Grid Boxes will be shipped to the Philippines later this year, newly fitted with the remote, Arduino-based monitoring system developed during the ‘hackathon’. The software will make sure that the boxes are working properly and transmit data back to the company’s servers in Italy.
For more info, see www.offgridbox.com.
