There we go, today marks the official launch of CurieuzeNeuzen in de Tuin, the day on which 4500 microclimate sensors pop up across Flanders!

You can take a look at their distribution on this map here.

These are scary and exciting moments, where we can follow in real-time if the connection of the sensors to the Orange Internet of Things-network are successful. As you can see on the right here, things are starting to look good, with already almost half of the sensors successfully installed.

Don’t underestimate that achievement: this is by far the largest IoT-sensor network that the country has ever seen, and we are thus truly technological pioneers.

But all is working relatively smoothly, while microclimate sensors are popping up in gardens across the whole region. Here at home, there was a little scientist helping out in any case (one that especially loves the little blinking lights that comes when sensors fail to connect to the network and, believe me, we have seen plenty of those during development!)

Location selection was done using our recently published selection algorithm that maximizes environmental heterogeneity. Hence the higher density of points in the more complex southern half of the region, and in urban centers.

Finally, below a sneak peek of the dashboard where participants will be able to follow the patterns in their own data, and how those compare with the rest of the region (available for participants from April 6th).