Indonesia’s makers tackle big issues at first hardware hackathon

In Indonesia, the promise of finding smart technologies to solve pressing social and environmental challenges inspires young people to become innovators and entrepreneurs.

One such challenge is water usage, says Lintang Sutawika, a member of the local hardware hacker collective FlowGo. Their idea for a smart water monitoring system for Indonesian cities won the recent hardware hackathon in Jakarta, the first of its kind held in Indonesia.

“Water sources in Indonesia come from groundwater and the public water company,” says Sutawika. “Especially with the case of groundwater, water usage is uncontrollable. This phenomenon contributes to the current state of Jakarta that is slowly sinking, with a ground level that is going below sea level.”

To help solve this issue, Sutawika’s group developed the FlowGo, a microcontroller-driven, battery-powered water flow sensor. The battery gets charged when water flows through it via a micro-hydro generator.

Home owners can check water usage from anywhere by requesting the device to send an update to a phone via SMS. But perhaps the larger benefit can result from working with collective water data available once many of these devices communicate back to one server.

“With real-time collective data about water usage, scientists, companies, and government institutions can take relevant actions,” says Sutawika.

Demo of the FlowGo water monitoring device.

More space for makers

Sutawika and his team are students at the University of Indonesia. Their backgrounds are diverse. Sutawika and Ismi Rosyiana Fitri study electrical engineering, Aldwin Akbar computer engineering, Darwin Ta and Novian Habibie computer science. They know each other through being part of the university’s robotics team, where they picked up the skills applied in the hackathon.

FlowGo is one of 26 simple and cheap-to-produce ideas presented at the hackathon that could contribute to making smarter data-driven decisions in Indonesia.

With new maker spaces opening and companies such as hackathon-sponsor Mediatrac providing more support and mentorship, the Indonesian hardware innovation scene is about to make a jump forward.

“I’ve so far only found one maker faire around Southeast Asia, and that is in Singapore, so we still have a lot of catching up to do,” says Sutawika. ”But with so many Indonesian makers and to-be makers, we have a lot of potential.”