On of the great outcomes for the Water Hackathon held March 23-25 was a new version of CSO sensor that seems very promising.
First and foremost, this sensor was a collaboration with Dan Seldon, Dustin Goodwin, Daniel Soto, John Feighery, Joe Saavedra and many more. You guys ROCK!
The idea behind the design of this sensor was to create a device that could be installed outside of a CSO (combined sewer overflow), in a publicly accessible place, and would use a variety of different sensing techniques to detect when a sewer overflow happened. The group decided that the first sensor would be water temperature. Even when mixed with storm runoff, overflows should be measurably warmer than the receiving waterbody. The temperature probe that we used is a waterproof digital sensor from Adafruit here in NYC.
For the second sensor, we decided to create our own electrical conductivity (EC) probe. The EPA has a some great details about EC and how its an indicator of water quality. Basically the more pure the water the lower the conductivity. Conversely, the more stuff, in our case sewage, thats in the water the high the conductivity will be.
There is great book recently published called Environmental Monitoring with Arduino which includes plans for a DIY EC sensor. Using parts from Radio Shack the team created our EC sensor and calibrated it with solution from Atlas Scientific.
These two sensors were connected to a custom arduino shield which was milled on the awesome Parsons PCB machine.
Everything was connected to an Arduino including a big battery, a charging circuit and a solor panel all from Adafruit and a GPRS Shield from SeeedStudio. This all was put into a small Pelican case and prepped to be installed in the Gowanus Canal.
The sensor is currently offline but will be back up soon after some updates! Check out the Pachube feed!
If your reading this post, sadly the water hackathon has already happened. But don’t be sad! LOTS OF AMAZING THINGS HAPPENED!
First, I want to thank everyone who participated. We had an amazing crew and it couldn’t have happened without you.
Second, Heather Leson, of Ushahidi made a fantastic live feed of the proceedings of the event. There you can see all the stuff that went down and browse the photos that were uploaded.
After a much needed/appreciated spring break trip to New Mexico I wanted to share a few things. The first is to show off pictures of my moms very own composting toilet.
This is the composting toilet that my mom and her partner have been using for 10 years! Its basically a five gallon bucket in a pretty box with a toilet set attached. The pot to the right contains “cover material” which you add to the toilet after you make a contribution, this is compost by the way. NO FLUSHING ALLOWED!
The second thing I want to share is a graphic about composting toilets and all the other ways we dispose of our “waste”. This was created by my friend Mathew and his partner Molly as a part of their project Cloacina. You can buy prints of these awesome posters too!
To continue the theme of creating devices that encourage water savings, I’ve been prototyping a device called “The Flush Capacitor” (thanks to @lizbarry for the name idea). This device measures the number of times you flush the toilet throughout the day and compares it to a set number of max flushes. As your number of flushes approaches the max a light changes from blue to red. This max number of flushes can be set and ideality would be based on a users average flush activity.
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.
