Here's the high-wire act in which I describe the West Virginia University sensor-journalism project with 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. This took place in a room of brilliant thinkers at Newsgeist 2015 earlier this month in Phoenix.
More details about the sensor project are available on the StreamLab site and in an earlier blog post.
I stumbled on a fun, visceral way to show how Arduinos can sense and respond.
In preparation for a presentation at the Online News Association Conference in Los Angeles, I grabbed a Ping distance sensor I had in a bin. The Ping works like a bat — it emits an inaudible, high-frequency sound, and listens for the sound to bounce off an object. The round-trip time between ping and reflection reveals the distance.
Yesterday the Streamlab class put do-it-yourself water monitors into Gatorade bottles and anchored them in the Monongahela River near Morgantown, West Virginia. They’re now texting their data readings live.
The link to the live chart is here, and the raw data is here.
We’re sensing conductivity, which is a good indicator of dissolved solids in the water, and temperature. The locations are: upstream of an industrial site, downstream of the same site and further downstream below the Morgantown lock and dam.
A summer of tinkering has culminated with a conductivity and temperature sensor that texts its data from inside a Gatorade bottle.
The contraption consists of a Riffle, which is an Arduino-like board designed to fit through the mouth of a water bottle and a Fona cell-phone board. And a bottle.
The plan is to submerge several of these along a stretch of the Monongahela River as part of a sensor-journalism class at West Virginia University. It’s a work in progress, but you can [see how things are going]. My job was to build a working conductivity sensor that would report its findings live. Here are the components and how I made it go.
Update: We actually deployed some of these sensors in a river!
About a month ago I built a texting temperature sensor, which had some energy-saving code I learned about. I wanted to see how many days it would last on one charge.
It's still running.
Capacitive sensing is how your phone’s touch screen works — basically detecting the natural charge in a person’s body on the screen.
I’ve seen Team Blinky friend Liza Stark play and build simple touch sensors using the same technique with Arduino, so this week I gave it a try.
My goal: Use a touch sensor instead of a button on the Monthly Mood Cube.
It turns out to be pretty easy.
Texting temperature data to Twitter is fun, but more useful is sending that information to a table.
That’s what I did this week, as my wanderings into wireless data collection continue: Post the temperature and humidity from my little experiment to a table at data.sparkfun.com.
Here are the steps as things stand now:
This all happens in just a few seconds, every 20 minutes.
In just a few weeks, a class of journalism students will be wading into West Virginia streams to deploy water sensors.
They’ll be sensing water conductivity over several weeks using a cool, Arduino-like board called Riffle.
But the crux of the system is a simple circuit I tried for the first time tonight.
I got the temperature sensor working and I got the Arduino texter working, but I had trouble getting them to work together.
Until this week.
After jumping several hurdles, I now have a portable temperature-texter, which has been sensing and texting to Twitter for two days now.
Taking temperature readings with an Arduino seems pretty straightforward — generic thermistors are easy to wire up. But I wanted something a more precise, with actual temperature readings.
So I got this air temperature and humidity sensor, and this week I gave it a whirl.