[dorkbotpdx-blabber] Air Quality Eggs

[Dan Revel]

Who is interested in bringing this to Portland:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edborden/air-quality-egg/posts/199459

Let's get together and figure out how we can make it happen!

--
d...@nopolabs.com
_______________________________________________
dorkbotpdx-blabber mailing list
dorkbotpd...@dorkbot.org
http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/dorkbotpdx-blabber

[Aaron Eiche]

That looks pretty cool, $10k is pretty steep (not for what they're offering, just hard to raise). Did you have any more specify thoughts on it?

One thing that comes to mind is a benefit to the cycling community. Air quality affects them heavily. When I lived I'm Salt Lake, the were frequently days where we were encouraged to stay indoors and not drive if we could avoid it. I always wondered what the folks who biked around did on those days. Having a network of air quality sensors around the city could benefit people out of doors tremendously.

[Monty Goodson]

I'm interested, and have a friend who is active in NW Portland's battle over air quality concerns, mostly due to pollution from Esco.

Getting 150 people on board in Portland to pitch in $70 for an egg doesn't seem out of reach.  $70 for an egg seems reasonable too.

Monty

[Aaron Eiche]

The egg itself collects information on Carbon Monoxide, NO2, temperature and humidity. More details here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edborden/air-quality-egg 

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 8:43 AM, Denis Heidtmann <denis.h...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 4:57 PM, Monty Goodson <mon...@bittybot.com> wrote:

I'm interested, and have a friend who is active in NW Portland's battle over air quality concerns, mostly due to pollution from Esco.

Getting 150 people on board in Portland to pitch in $70 for an egg doesn't seem out of reach.  $70 for an egg seems reasonable too.

Monty

I may be interested.  BTA may have interested members.  Maybe even DEQ has an interest.  But I have questions.  What pollutants are measured?  At what sensitivity?  The information may be available, but I guess I missed it.  Where might I see some details?

-Denis

[Ward Cunningham]

I'm wondering, do you own the data that you collect?

Can you move it to a server that you own?

Can you still participate in a community of sensors if you make the move?

Is such a move drag-and-drop simple?

[Aaron Eiche]

I get the impression that the answer to your first 3 questions is yes. All the data coming into the egg and all the data going into the basestation is yours to do what you want with. This is open hardware, one might argue that the data coming out of sensor is free for anyone to sniff... 

It shouldn't be too difficult to clip the wings on the pachube part and have your server do it instead...

As for the last piece, I suspect not, at least not at the beginning.

*I don't actually know any of this, but it's what I gathered looking through their kickstarter, google group, and wiki.

[Denis Heidtmann]

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Aaron Eiche <aaron...@gmail.com> wrote:

The egg itself collects information on Carbon Monoxide, NO2, temperature and humidity. More details here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edborden/air-quality-egg 

Thanks for the link.  I wonder what the value of such would be for Portland.  I am sure that there are areas of concern for those  pollutants,  but there are more pressing concerns for the region overall.  Quote from DEQ website:

"Portland's air currently meets all federal air quality health standards. These standards exist for six pollutants known as the criteria pollutants (carbon monoxide, ozone, particulate matter (PM_2.5 and PM₁₀), nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and lead. The criteria pollutants of most concern in Portland are ozone and fine particulate matter.

In recent years air toxics have taken center stage as pollutants of concern throughout the Portland region. Air toxics are generally defined as air pollutants known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health problems. ..."

The egg is a start; I wonder what it would take to do the particulates?

-Denis

[Brandon]

I agree that while CO and NO2 are important, I'm more interested in PM2.5 and PM10 as well as ozone for our area. 

I'd think housing the sensor in a PVC container out in direct sunlight would generate some emissions of it's own :-) Wonder how sensitive these things really are? Most consumer grade CO meters I have encountered are not very sensitive. 

I do have a calibrated AQ meter that needs some new filters if anyone wants to compare their <$100 egg to a >$5000 instrument.

Later,

Brandon Mathis
KD7INF
brand...@gmail.com

[Greg Peek]

Is the Air Quality Egg design expandable to allow adding sensors?  The Wiki lists an ozone sensor. I didn't see anything about  a particulate sensor.

Open source + technologists and makers in Dorkbot = why not do our own build/project? More scalable for us to make X units at $70 each, and build more over time, than coming up with the $10K for exactly 150 units. 

In any case, raising $10K in 20 days, with the danger of someone else purchasing that one available reward, seems impractical, unless someone has ties to an organization that could quickly make a $10K contribution.

I want the 3D files so I can fabricate egg cases for my own projects.

Greg

[Rick Burkard]

Does anyone have experience with installing a Seagate Dockstar boot loader via JTAG?

 

Here's my situation:

 I've been running the Dockstar with PlugApps operating system for more that a year as my home server (I got the idea from dorkbot-blabber). I recently tried to connect the hardware serial port to an AVR project I am working on and managed to "brick" it. The on-board LED now just flashes yellow - never gets to the solid green  indicating the OS is up and running.

 

In hopes of getting things working again, I purchased a BusPirate (V3a) board from SparkFun, upgraded it to 6.10 (with support for JTAG). I installed OpenOCD which is purported to support the BusPirate and  have attempted to run it but am currently stuck there. I'm not sure what to make of the message spew and I am supposed to connect to the server via telneting to localhost port 444, which I have not been able to do in cygwin.

 

Anybody resurrected a DockStar and or has used openOCD?? Any help would be appreciated!

[Ward Cunningham]

Speaking of environmental bias in sensor networks, here is a crowd-sourced survey of weather stations. 

http://www.surfacestations.org/

The built world has surrounded many one-time well placed sensors. Here is a comparison from their pages. There is also a peer-reviewed scientific paper describing the project available on the site.

[Dave Edick]

Have you tried the serial console?  I recovered mine that way.  Most "bricked" Dockstars still have working bootloaders.

--
/Dave Edick/  dave....@gmail.com or da...@solderslingers.com

See http://solderslingers.com for Electronic Kits and Components.

[David Madden]

On 4/2/2012 13:57, Rick Burkard wrote:
> Does anyone have experience with installing a Seagate Dockstar boot loader via JTAG?
>
> Here's my situation:
> I've been running the Dockstar with PlugApps operating system for
> more that a year as my home server (I got the idea from
> dorkbot-blabber). I recently tried to connect the hardware serial
> port to an AVR project I am working on and managed to "brick" it. The
> on-board LED now just flashes yellow - never gets to the solid green
> indicating the OS is up and running.

It's been a while since I had to fiddle around with my Dockstar (knock
wood!) but I'd be surprised if you could brick it just by connecting a
serial port. (More likely if you were installing new kernels or poking
around in the Flash.)

So, although I haven't used JTAG on a Dockstar, I think there's a fair
chance you'll be able to recover without it.

Bring your DS next week and I'd be happy to help with it. Or if you
need it back online sooner, you could bring it by my office (SW
Downtown) or my house (SW hills) and I'll see if I can do anything for you.

Regards,
--
Mersenne Law LLC · www.mersenne.com · +1-503-679-1671
- Small Business, Startup and Intellectual Property Law -
1500 SW First Ave. · Suite 1170 · Portland, Oregon 97201

[Doug Ausmus]

@Gregg- I was thinking along the same lines... I don't want to take project funding away, but I did not that their funding goal was reached and well-exceeded already, so why  not do our own using our internal group "library" of skills and previous projects?

-Doug