Matthew Fritch | greenSTEM Network

02 May

Eyeballs and Circuits

Week 2 at Science Leadership Academy’s Beeber campus saw the students begin constructing two aspects of the Root Kit: the circuit board (a JeeNode, which is a low-cost, low-power microcontroller with a radio transceiver) that controls the sensors, and the artistic housing that will cover the Root Kit outside in the garden. One group of students soldered while the other group painted.

We followed JeeLabs’ excellent step-by-step instructions to solder the microcontroller boards. The students are charged with creating their own do-it-yourself manual for creating Root Kits, and their main tips for soldering were 1) Keep track of how long the solder wire is—too long and you don’t have much control, too short and you increase the risk of burning yourself; and 2) Soldering gets easier as you go along. Definitely good advice.

The students also got to work on their two housing designs: an eyeball (above), and a crashed rocketship. The eyeball came together quickly: acrylic paint, some glitter glue, and a plastic bowl. It looks excellent—I hadn’t considered how these designs need to be bold and simple; they should be apparent amid garden vegetation from a third-floor classroom window 100 feet away. The eyeball achieves that. More on the rocketship design next week, as we didn’t have quite the right cutting tools for the plastic fins. Student tip for working with recycled 2-liter soda bottles: Use a base coat of white paint first, then put a color coat (in our case, silver) over top of it. The first coat doesn’t adhere well to the bottle’s plastic.

A word of advice for procuring housing materials: Dollar stores are your friend when you can’t find recycled plastics that fit your design needs. Ideally, we’d use recycled materials 100% of the time, but sometimes exceptions are made. Just make those exceptions as cheaply as possible.

24 Apr

Design Day at SLA

Yeah, that does say “duck butt” on the whiteboard. It’s a long story. At Science Leadership Academy’s Beeber campus, a 9th grade class is becoming a company. Its product is the Root Kit, and over the next 8 weeks the students will be responsible for building the kits, soldering the circuit boards, designing the housing, building the housing, installing the sensors, troubleshooting the kit, and creating a do-it-yourself construction manual for other schools. Is that too much to ask?

Yesterday, the SLA Beeber students did some rapid idea generation (I can’t stand the word “brainstorming”) to come up with concepts for the Root Kit housing. Factors to consider: This will be out in a garden, so it has to stand up to the elements; it doesn’t have to be waterproof, but it can’t be made of cardboard and paper, either. Using recycled materials whenever possible is good. And it can’t be made of metal—the radio signal from the Root Kit doesn’t carry well when the antenna is enclosed in metal.

Look back at the top picture and you can see that, based on the distribution of Post-It notes on the whiteboard (a Post-It indicates a student liked an idea), there was little consensus. None at all, in fact. Not even a hint of it. At the end of the day, we narrowed it down to two designs (an eye and a crashed rocketship) based on … I’m not sure, exactly. Buildability was one factor; the garden gnome was a great idea, for example, but we lack the sculpting skills to make it happen at the moment. Also, SLA Beeber’s mascot is a rocket, so that design seemed apt. It’s buildable, too, perhaps using two recycled 2-liter soda bottles.

23 Apr

Build Day

Yesterday, the three winning teams in the greenSTEM student design competition gathered at the Fairmount Water Works to construct housings for the Root Kits. We had paint, pipe cleaners, modeling clay, hot glue guns and much more on hand to help the students make their designs come to life. Above, the team from Cook-Wissahickon gets their futuristic LED-lit dome construction underway. Below, Greenfield students mold clay (we used Crayola Model Magic) around a bowl that will become the base of their sword in the stone design.

Glue, paint and clay are drying. We’ll present the finished products in the near future. One last shot, though: A Nebinger student creates a spider (yes, he wanted it to have six legs—he had final say over that) from a hollowed-out football.

Thanks to the Water Works for hosting this event! Thank you to Jay Cruz, Sue Patterson, Darya Drahun, Chris Nies and Nicholas Chaya for bringing art supplies, tools, and assisting the students.

21 Apr

The Story Is On The Cover

Photo: Neal Santos/Philadelphia City Paper

A huge thank you to Philadelphia City Paper for featuring the greenSTEM Network on the cover of last week’s issue. “The Story Is In The Soil” was written by digital media and film editor Paulina Reso, and it efficiently captures the many facets of this project. Namely, the environmental benefits of the Water Department’s Green City, Clean Waters plan, the unique partnership between the city and civic hackers (thank you, Jarvus Innovations), and the impact our work can have in Philly public schools whose STEM education resources can be stretched thin. (Also, the pull quote from Nebinger 8th grader Amir Woodson couldn’t have been better scripted in an after-school special: “It will teach me how to love plants.”)

We also got a really nice writeup over at Generocity, a fantastic resource for more info on social innovation in Philadelphia.

16 Apr

Student Design Competition

designcomp1

Last week, judges met at the Fairmount Water Works to view the submissions for the greenSTEM Challenge, a student design competition to create artistic, original housings for the sensors set to be installed at three Philadelphia schools later this month. Competition was fierce—the student team at Greenfield who submitted the zombie head design deserves an honorable mention—but we selected three winning designs: a sword in the stone (Greenfield), a spider (Nebinger), and a futuristic light-up dome (Cook-Wissahickon). The winners are below; the next step is to gather the students for a day of building.

Greenfield Elementary: Zoe, Alexei, Jordan

Written Description:

Over the device we will put a block of foam that hardens for more durability. We will make a sword handle out of water bottles filled with paper and pipes. We will spray orange, brown, and silver paint on the pipes. We will also spray paint the foam silver. The end result will be an homage to the classic story of King Arthur. The wires will come out of the foam. The device will be obscured in a nice cover that complements the color of its surroundings and the storytelling we grew up with. The foam will be covered in dirt and rocks to blend in with the ground.

Nebinger Elementary: Amir

Written Description:

My project is a tarantula. I will have the device inside a Pelican 1010 casing with straws. I will put the wires inside the straws and have the other end connected to the head of the tarantula. I made it easy for you to figure it out in these pictures.

Cook-Wissahickon Elementary: Jonathan, Jhalil, Sean

Written Description:

We will have a plastic dome around the data-sending unit with LED lights inside the top of the dome. We will use battery packs to power the LED lights [to indicate] when it needs to be watered. We will use a circuit board to turn on the LED lights because it will be hooked up to the sensors.

Congratulations to the students! And thank you to the judges: Beth Miller (Community Design Collaborative), Alex Gilliam (Public Workshop), Lisa Wool (Partnership for the Delaware Estuary) Ellen Freedman Schultz (Fairmount Water Works), and Tiffany Ledesma-Groll and Jay Cruz (Philadelphia Water Department).

19 Mar

Root Kit Construction

With the installation of sensors at four Philadelphia schools about a month away, it was time to build some additional Root Kits. Version 1.0 is housed in a Pelican 1010, a $10 waterproof case normally used for stashing your cell phone during whitewater rafting trips or something. We used a half-inch drill bit to drill out the three holes for the soil moisture sensor cables, and the cables are secured to the case with PG7 cable glands (about $3 for a pack of 10) that you can tighten by hand.

A few words about drilling: This was a two-person job; one person steadying the left side of the case and the other drilling, slowly and with constant pressure, the three holes. At first, we experimented with drilling pilot holes with smaller bits and moving up to the half-inch bit, but by the end we just did the job with the half-inch bit from start to finish. (We haven’t yet cracked the plastic on the Pelican cases, but have definitely destroyed a variety of less-sturdy plastic components while drilling.) It was difficult to align the holes and make it look pretty. The drill bit walks. This is not of great concern, however, since these cases will eventually be covered by students’ creative and artistic designs.

Speaking of which, students at Greenfield, Nebinger, and Cook-Wissahickon elementary schools are currently designing Root Kit housings for the design competition. The deadline for submissions is April 4, and more info and downloadable packets and drawing templates are here.

We’re in the process of assembling a complete set of instructions for assembling the Root Kit and plan to work with students at Science Leadership Academy’s Beeber campus this spring to be the first large-scale manufacturers of these sensor kits.

07 Feb

Design Help Has Arrived

Another item to add to the long list of things I am not: graphic designer. The greenSTEM team was extremely lucky, however, to get some help from a couple of designers who’ve joined us at Code For Philly meetups and offered their talents. The schematic above—illustrating how the Root Kit sends rain garden data to the web—was created by Nnena Odim. She took a hastily scrawled drawing and turned it into the clear, artful representation above. Check out her website.

We’ve also been fortunate to be joined by Danielle Parnes, an industrial designer who’s currently working with the Community Design Collaborative. Danielle has gotten us more organized on specific tasks and focused on communications, among other things. She also took our looseleaf logo sketch and turned it into a professional-looking logo:

Thanks to Nnena and Danielle for their work—all the technical things we’ve accomplished with programming and sensors are meaningless if the ideas and intentions behind them aren’t communicated clearly.

10 Jan

Next Step: Spectral Analysis?

Image: Public Lab

Spectral analysis—it’s not just for NASA anymore. With Infragram, the people over at Public Lab have done something amazing. They’ve figured out a way that anyone can use near-infrared photography to determine the health of plants. The science behind it is well explained here, but the short explanation is that chlorophyll in plants absorb blue and red light during photosynthesis (but not green—green light is reflected, and that’s what we see—or infrared light). What Infragram allows you to do is upload an image from a camera with an infrared filter, and it analyzes the photo to show you where the healthy plants are (see image above—NDVI stands for “normalized difference vegetation index”). Again, that’s not the whole story of what’s going on here, but you get the idea.

Now, you may ask, where does one get an infrared camera? Check out the Pi NoIR, a $30 infrared camera that attaches to a Raspberry Pi. Order from Adafruit and they also include the blue plastic filter for capturing images for Infragram. (Although we are not quite sure how to attach the filter to the camera—do you just tape it over the lens?) So imagine this: In addition to monitoring soil moisture and temperature, students can use the Root Kit to take photos of their rain garden, for example, upload it to Infragram and actually see photosynthesis (or evidence of it, at least). That seems … futuristic.

Lots of interesting stuff is happening with the Raspberry Pi and cameras. One of our favorite things is Upstagram, wherein some hackers put a Raspberry Pi and a camera inside a tiny house attached to helium balloons (like in the movie Up) and floated it over Paris to get a bird’s eye view of the city. Check it out:

20 Dec

Git Repos Are Now Live

The longest-running inside joke among our team is “Git repos are now live.” It’s the title of an immense email chain started months ago that, even though we use GitHub and Dropbox and Google docs, refuses to die and inadvertently contains lots of documentation. (“Git repos” are GitHub repositories—spaces online where we store code and files.)

So, as we wrap up 2013, we got this little gift from team member Louis Cook, a graphic designer:

16 Dec

Civic Hacks 2013

Last Friday, team member Christopher Nies presented our project at Civic Hacks 2013, a showcase for the city’s civic hacking projects. Thanks to Technically Philly for the roundup (and putting us in the top 5). Chris, who specializes in Python, Arduino and Javascript (and also has a rad hobby making his own bags for cyclists), has been an integral part of the project and a great and enthusiastic spokesperson for civic hacking and the virtues of open source data.

If you are unsure about civic hacking, experience dizziness or sweating, or have a download that lasts for more than 8 hours, consult a doctor or visit the Code for Philly website. Be sure to check out some of the other innovative projects that are underway.