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!

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

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.

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!

My presentation will be on Saturday. I’m excited to hear about the status of the sewer systems here in London.

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.

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!

Kinda geeky: check out graphs on Pachube (pronounced Patch-bay) https://pachube.com/feeds/44129 0 = no alert 1 = DONTFLUSHME

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.