Announcements
Upcoming events at ManyLabs:
- Work party this coming Thursday, September 10 from 4-6 PM at ManyLabs. We will be building plant boxes for 2nd graders that will be rolled from the exhibit space to outside.
- Stay tuned for more exciting events!
Kick-starting team formation
We’ll circulate through the room, and start assigning folks to teams. We’ll have facilitators organizing the projects throughout the room.
Dav:
- BIDS Guests
- Ecostations Data Access Monitor (EDAM)
- HOLOS / EcoEngine (preview, but no specific project yet)
- ODK contributions
- Clinton Global Health Access (preview, specific projects en route)
- Primary education tutoring
Temina:
- BITSS open data audit
- CEGA impact
Anthony:
- Aurorasaurus for protest observation
- Berkeley seismology visualizations
- ManyLabs air quality sensors
- (John Naulty if in the room) NeurotechX (preview, pending specific project)
Arduinos as a basic platform
Reading / Tech
You are highly encouraged to buy your own Arduino and related electronics! However, we will provide teams of 2-4 with sufficient materials to complete all projects. A shopping list will be provided.
Please read up on arduinos on the internet. Keep track of interesting URLs you find. Good places to start are adafruit and sparkfun (they will also try to sell you things).
Tentative plan
- Intro to sensor-based projects
- GPS monitoring of water collection habits
- Temperature monitoring of cookstoves
- Combined sensor and actuation to implement a demand response system
- Air quality (cf. Greg Neimeyer, Peter Sand, Matt Gee)
- What’s a microcontroller?
- Why Arduinos
- What else might you use?
- What sensors are available
- Trip sensors
- Switches
- Transducers (light, sound, pressure)
- Open Energy Monitor (an open source power monitoring project)
- Flexbox project
- Clamp sensors to measure current
Notes from Class
Second meeting: 2015-09-03.
Agenda
- Announcements
- Projects/team formation
Announcements
Get on Gitter.
- At the bottom of the class site, there is a link for joining Gitter
There are upcoming events at ManyLabs. ManyLabs is like a tech shop/hacker space around science and education.
- Plant boxes for 2nd graders in SOMA
- Nerds for Nature Hackathon
Course Entry Codes handed out today.
Teams
Established projects
There are about 10 projects groups can choose to work on.
- Campus Pass System
- OpenDataKit
- Aurorasaurus for Protest Observation
- NeurotechX
- Air Quality Sensors with ManyLabs
- Earthquake Measurement and Visualization
- Ecostation Data Access Monitor
- Auditing Open Data Publications with BITSS
- Conflict Monitoring
More details here.
For teams, the following are needed:
- Team lead
To make serious progress, you’ll want about 10 hours a week. Not everyone has to commit to this level, though. Think about: how to make it the best experience for yourself; setting up project goals and timeline.
Each group will have a mentor: clients or BIDS Fellows.
Student comment: for each project, it would be nice to know the expectations.
Other projects
Vivek. Doubling the occupancy of all vehicular traffic. “An Uber for drivers.” Do the reverse of what Uber does. Match riders to all of the cars driving around. “Can cut the cost of a ride by 10.” Goal: save everybody money, perhaps time, and carbon emissions. Existing app, Move, tracks locations and means (biking, walking, etc.). The hard problem is a data science problem: what should the footprint be for adoption, the go-to-market strategy?
Building Sensors
With Javier, Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER).
Why sensors?
Sensor Ecosystem
Sensors, gateways, and examples.
Non-obvious things:
- Matching identifiers
- Maintenance
Lots of sensors available for the class. If you think you need to measure something, speak with Dav and/or Javier.
Mobile phones are getting a lot cheaper and have lots of sensors built in:
- Accelerometers
- Compass
- Gyroscope
- Bluetooth
- WiFi
- GPS
- Light Sensor
- Camera
- Capacitive Touch
- Temperature
Examples of what you can measure with sensors
- Motion or Activity
- People
- Air
- Water
Motion or activity. Interesting use of accelerometers: measure whether or not lighting changing walking speed.
Arduino: a “microcontroller” that runs your code directly, giving direct access to hardware (no operating system).
Raspberry Pi:
BeagleBone: can be used as a gateway
Cookstoves
To get a sense of how often people use cook stoves and for how long, iButton temperature sensors can be used.
For a lot of social science projects, you’re not only monitoring physical things, you’re also asking people questions.
FoneAstra
Can keep track of time. Most systems don’t have this capability, unless connected to a network.
Used for the Milk Bank project: interfaced with the phone and could monitor pasteurization of milk.