An IoT Workshop in Accra

Participants on site at GMET

When
13-15 March 2023
Where
University of Ghana Legon Campus
Objective
Capacity building in Western Africa
Partners
West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN)
Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMET)
International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Outcomes
3-day workshop and hands-on training activities for about 30 participants from local partner institutions.
Deployment of a pilot LoRaWAN meteo-station.
Legon/Accra instrument dashboard

Country profile

Ghana has a tropical climate with two main seasons: the wet and dry seasons. The rainy season lasts from May to September in the north, from April to October in the center, and from April to November in the south. The eastern coastal belt is warm and comparatively dry, while the south-west corner of Ghana is hot and humid, and the north of Ghana is hot and dry.

Connectivity

NRENs play a critical role by providing essential connectivity, resources, and support to the research and education communities. The Ghanaian Academic and Research Network (GARNET) hosts the LoRaWAN gateways that are providing connectivity for the weather stations in Ghana.

Deployment outcomes

A LoRaWAN gateway has been installed on Ghana University campus.

A local MQTT broker has been set up by GARNET.

Three meteorological instruments were installed at the Ghana Meteorological Agency’s Accra office. Distance to gateway: about 4.2km. This LoRaWAN weather station provides temperature, humidity, pressure, solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction and precipitation data. Each instrument delivers data packets in 10 minute intervals.

Data from Meteo Instruments

Data transits as LoRa payload from the instruments to the LoRaWAN gateway and then as MQTT payload from there to the GARNET MQTT broker. At this stage, data is made available to users who are subscribed to relevant topics on the broker.

Note: It is up to the end user to retrieve and store data of interest.

ICTP provides a Legon/Accra instrument dashboard which is free to access and use.

Last readings pooled

Here is an example panel with “last readings” collected from all instruments.

Some of the available data is not displayed in this panel for various reasons (for example the wind direction). We expect to maintain and improve the panel as we develop the database and visualization tools.

Along with the meteorological payload, the gateway provides some information about the communications, which may be useful when troubleshooting the devices.

Availability and Access

There are several methods for accessing the weather station’s output for custom usage:

  • Using the publicly available Legon/Accra instrument dashboard provided by ICTP:
    1. Place a link to the dashboard in your website like so:
      <a href="http://iot-ws.sti.ictp.it/dashboard/d-solo/M4cs5FYVk/accra-legon-instruments">Legon/Accra instrument dashboard</a>
    2. This dashboard’s panels may be embedded in web applications using the iframe tag. Example:
      <iframe src="http://iot-ws.sti.ictp.it/dashboard/d-solo/M4cs5FYVk/accra-legon-instruments?panelId=6"
	  width="100%" height="300" frameborder="0"></iframe>
      Insert this code snippet in your HTML document to replicate one of the panels on this page.
    3. Data for each panel is available in CSV format. To download it, go to the the panel of interest, then look for the inspect menu under its heading.
  • Subscribe directly to GARNET’s MQTT broker (contact Dr Emmanuel Togo to request access);
  • Subscribe directly to the bridged MQTT broker at ICTP (contact STI to request access);

About Partners

GMet

The Ghana Meteorological Agency exists to provide efficient and reliable meteorological information by collecting, processing, archiving and dissemination of meteorological information to end-users.

WACREN

The West and Central African Research and Education Network aims to provide a World-class infrastructure and services for the West and Central African Research and Education community for development.

ICTP

The International Centre for Theoretical Physics is a unique institution that explores fundamental scientific questions at the highest level, promotes active engagement with scientists in developing countries, and advances international cooperation through science.

Special Moments

It was a lot of hard work to prepare for this workshop, but the toil was more than repaid by a wonderful experience in Ghana, and by meeting a lot of really nice people from the Western Africa region and beyond. Some of these wonderful moments are captured in this photo album.

Feel free to contact us if you wish to share yours!

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