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.

The initial message read thusly:

Hi friends in greenness-~-

I concocted a way to save plastic bags from the environment (doing my part!) I hid my trashcan from the janitorial night-staff, and have stopped using it!

If I ever have garbage items in-hand, which is rarely, I walk over to my area’s printer and trashcan nook and deposit it there, saving the bags at my desk which otherwise are replaced each night. Someone one-up that

The follow up:

One up that? Easy!

I use no plastic bags at all and keep my garbage in my Acme in-office composter. This allows me tocompost my (and a couple of coworkers) lunch waste into soil that I can use to grow wheat in my office window. I grow wheat using a solar powered, hydroponic system, where the water for the hydroponic system is collected from the building AC condensation, and pumped through the compost. This both filters and nutritionalizes the water, as the water is also pumped through my fish tank (600liters) where I grow Tilapia for my lunch, fish sandwiches.

The wheat is grown staggered in such a way that I have a continuous harvest of grain. I grind thisgrain in my hand operated grinder to make the buns in my solar oven (I keep this in the parking lotfor cooking my fish sandwiches and buns). The stalks/straw from the wheat I cut long and weave into tatami mats that I have put around a small zen garden where I can go to get centered after a long stressful day (raking gravel really does it for me) in the office. The bones from the fish, Iput through a “fast fossilization process” (yes the same one that makes dino bones seem older than 5k years) that makes them very hard. I can then use them as rakes in my zen garden or donate them to be used for combs by some of the less well kempt engineers in my group.

I am sure you other engineers out there have designed similar system. I cannot wait to hear about yours!