DontFlushMe is representing NYC in London at the 2nd London Citizen Cyberscience Summit.
My presentation will be on Saturday. I’m excited to hear about the status of the sewer systems here in London.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
Such an amazing group of supporters! The DontFlushMe IOBY fundraiser is complete!
I know that there were a lot of emails for me in the last few days so I apologize for that.
I hope I can keep you excited about the project and more importantly excited about helping the health of NYCs waterways.
As always comments welcome and encouraged.
Show your love for DontFlushMe and the New York Harbor on Valentines day.
Tomorrow, all donations up to $200 WILL BE DOUBLED!
Ask your Valentine to show the love and make a donation in your name!
A $40 donation makes all the difference!
Basic CSO alerts are now available on Twitter! Follow @dontflushme. Please send me your feedback and comments! These notifications are generated by monitoring borough level precipitation data. If there is over 0.1″ of rain in a hour or 0.4″ of rain in 24 hours an alert is triggered.
Kinda geeky: check out graphs on Pachube (pronounced Patch-bay) https://pachube.com/feeds/44129 0 = no alert 1 = DONTFLUSHME
Fantastic turnout at SPACECRAFT today for the Brooklyn Pie Bake! Many thanks to sponsors IOBY, ETSY, and the Brooklyn Brewery. It was also great to see Carl again after last weekend’s mad EcohackNYC.
==UPDATE: check out http://publiclavatory.org/ to see the googlemap mashup, as featured on GoogleMapsMania. ==
We’re at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program for EcoHackNYC, working with 17 new friends on the mapping application for DontFlushMe.
Jeff, Chris, Leif, and Matt work on a map that shows which CSO your toilet flows to during an overflow event. (geocoding with GoogleMapsAPI, postGIS functionality provided by CartoDB, map written in OpenLayers).
Karen, Wendy, Josh, Sheiva, Eric, and Jeni designing the graphic look of the application and writing copy for the educational components.
After a good deal of waiting I finally “gained access” to the CSO targeted for the prototype sensor! After spending a good deal of time looking around and testing the sensor it became clear that there will be a slight redesign required for this particular CSO. The thickness of the concrete overhead necessitates the phone, which makes the network connection, to be closer to the outside. I hope to make the changes to the prototype and have the sensor deployed in the next couple of weeks.
Thanks to Steve Duncan – undercity.org
I had the great fortune to meet Rob Buchanan at the S.W.I.M. CSO notification meeting. Him and I decided that there was no time like the present to take a boat trip down Wallabout channel to investigate the NCB-014 and NCB-013 CSOs. Rob graciously supplied a great little row boat and we set out from the temporary floating boat dock, donations for which are being collected on ioby as well. At close to low tide we were able to inspect both CSOs as well as a good number of unmarked pipes and tunnels that empty into the channel.
Our little boat was too tall to enter the NCB-014 CSO but we successfully rowed into NCB-013 to the north. The tide gate was clearly accessible as were some side tunnels. A wake kicked up by the new East River Ferry cut our visit short as it created breaking waves underground! Crazy…
I’ve been working hard on the latest version of the “SewerSense” sensor. With a new case, and new range finder, a door switch and better power management the new sensor is coming along swimmingly!!
New Sensor Case
Plug for flood gate sensor
New Range Finder
The updates include using a larger Pelican 1200 series case, in the awesome orange color. This will make room for all the batteries that I’ll be using, 12 d cells I think. I modified the case to attach the new ultrasonic rangefinder that I received from Sparkfun. The new sensor has a 25 foot range with 1cm accuracy! Its also IP67 certified, means its tougher than shit… Also I added a plug to attach a door sensor for the flood gate. This should alert me when the flood gates actually open to allow for calibration of the range finder.
Latest SewerSense prototype