Meshed first approached Randwick City Council in 2018 about the benefits of LoRaWAN and The Things Network. The council embraced the idea and went on to produce one of the strongest Australian examples of using connected sensing to improve public safety, its Smart Beaches initiative.
Where It Started
The council secured funding under the Australian Government's Smart Cities and Suburbs Program, which was designed to spur investment in exactly this kind of data-driven decision technology. The brief was to enhance the visitor experience across the council's beaches, with public safety as the thread running through it.
Beaches are unusually hard to inform people about. Conditions change within an hour, the audience is transient, and almost nobody checks a council website while standing on the sand.
Two Beaches, One Network
Meshed established managed LoRaWAN gateways at Coogee and Maroubra. With coverage in place, the council deployed a range of connected sensor devices feeding the visitor display through Opendatasoft, the open data platform provided by our long-standing project partner Peclet Technology.
Near real-time hyperlocal weather and wind readings come from a LoRaWAN Sonic weather station mounted at each location. Hyperlocal is the operative word. Conditions at Coogee and conditions at Maroubra are genuinely different, and a regional forecast flattens exactly the difference a swimmer cares about.
What the Display Shows
The sensor readings are only part of what appears. The display also carries Bureau of Meteorology forecasts, bus timetables and other publicly available information, all assembled through the same open data platform.
That combination is the quiet design decision in this project. A visitor standing on the promenade gets the water temperature, the wave height, the wind, the forecast for the next few hours and the time of the next bus home, in one glance. None of those data sets belongs to the same owner.
The Part No Sensor Can Supply
Advice and comments from the local Life Savers about beach, rip and wave conditions are incorporated into the same display. This matters more than it might appear. A weather station can report wind and water temperature accurately, and still tell you nothing about where the rip is running this afternoon.
The Smart Beaches approach treats human judgement as a data source of equal standing, published through the same channel as the sensor readings. The same principle shows up in Lake Macquarie's LGA-wide network, which also grew out of a Surf Life Saving collaboration.
Our thanks to the Randwick City Council team for driving the initiative, and to Peclet Technology for being such good partners across many of our smart cities projects.
The best public information system is the one people walk past anyway.
