Russell Nelson (Open Source Initiative)

For my final session of the day, I’m in Environmental Monitoring with Arduino and Compatibles. Since I attended the Arduino tutorial on Monday, I thought it would be fun to attend a session on using them.

The take-away points, presented up front for our convenience:

• Environmental monitoring is important
• Arduino is cheap and easy
• Small computers are fun

The Arduino is not just the chip and board, but the IDE used to program the board. It also, as I learned on Monday, has a very shallow learning curve.

Russell works for a company doing water monitoring of the Hudson River. He’s using his domain knowledge from his job to explain how one would do something similar on a smaller scale. The values he describes detecting, and the circuits used to take the measurements, are,

• Temperature
• Turbidity
• Salinity – can’t measure this directly, but salinity conducts and we can measure resistance

Now I just need to figure out what I want to monitor at home.