GreenEduComp: Low cost green computing system for education in Rural India: A scheme for sustainable development through education

Abstract

In this paper, we present an inoculated combination of technologies to facilitate and advocate education in Rural India. A combination of open-sourced Arduino, single board-processors like Raspberry Pi are used to develop infrastructure to empower education in remote and rural parts of India. Being a self-contained system, the dependencies on external factors is reduced as it might not be possible to operate regular computers without grid-connected supply. The whole system is powered using renewable energy (RE) source viz., Solar PV. This implies that the system is an independent green computing device. Further, this enables commerce while augmenting education facilities for the underserved population residing in remote and rural areas where energy is still a challenge today. The Ardunio is used to perform various systemic operations like motioning the load, calculating the ambient light etc. The Raspberry Pi is the core processor unit of the system which typically acts like a computer that runs on a Linux-based Kernel Operating System (OS). The System-on-Chip (SoC) is then connected to a HDMI display periphery hub which switched between multiple displays. The supply to all of this sub-system is powered by a Solar PV. A charge control is implemented to overlook the charging process of the storage battery.