Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest

http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/02/21/its-not-fairytale-seattle-build-nations-first-food-forest

I found this article about an organization in Seattle that is helping create a food forest, similar to one of my multifunctional spaces using urban agriculture, to make a seven-acre plot of land into a park planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: blueberry and raspberry bushes; trees, including walnut and chestnut, apples and pears; pineapple, citrus, guava, persimmons, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. This food forest will be open to the public to harvest freely just as I had designed in my project; contributing to the community welfare. The concept of a food forest encourages urban agriculture and is about the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild.

Regional MusicScapes

I finally got the rest of my parts for my Seeeduino. The parts I ordered included a Grove Dust Sensor, a Grove Base Shield, a Grove Music Shield, a Grove LED bar, extra cables, breadboards, and resistors. The Grove Base Shield makes everything easier to connect. Everything is pretty much just plug and play. Then you just have to upload the coding script. I was able to find a sketch script for the Grove Dust Sensor from the Seeeduino website. I uploaded it and it worked perfectly. The sensor was able to outpt air particulate concentration level data to the computer monitor in 30 second intervals. With some tweaking, I was able to get this interval down to 4 seconds. Although this made the reading less accurate, it provided faster feedback to check that the dust sensor was in fact working. The hard part was now getting this to output music. Unfortunately, the Grove Music Shield came unassembled unlike the Grove Base Shield which was ready to plug into the Seeeduino Stalker. The music shield needed some soldering, but I did not have enough time to do so as the SoCal Maker Con is right around the corner. I was, however, able to get the Grove Dust Sensor to output the concentration levels to the Grove LED Bar. It took some time learning some basic coding, but I successfully programmed it. In the future, when I have more time, I will try to build and program the Grove Music Shield.

These Seeeduino modules are the technical component to my final design project, Regional MusicScapes.

Late Post: 11/08/14, SoCal Maker Con!

On November 8th, 2014 Cal Poly Pomona class LA301 went to the SoCal Maker Con to present our class projects along with my our built Seeeduino modules. The event ended up being much more interesting than I first anticipated. Robots battles, flying drones, and 3D printers were just some of the things that were there to see. I even saw some UCLA research student who created smart phone mods that were able to detect diseases in the unpurified waters. When I arrived, I was directed to the booth that was designated for us. Upon meeting up with Professor Lehrman and a few of my other classmates, I noticed that we were getting much more attention than we all thought we would. In fact, there was someone asking me questions about my project so much that my voice started to go. It was great hearing how many random people thought my project was a great idea. Our booth was visited by all types of people including electrical engineers, computer scientists, and other electronic fanatics. I was approached by a few people who were interested in taking my project to the next level. A venture capitalist named David Leech quickly gave me his email and asked me to contact him. Kevin from COMPANY was interested in putting my sensors into his drones and seeing where that project. Going to this event made me more interested in building Arduino type modules. There are so many possibilities that are now within grasp of someone who is not an electrical engineer or computer scientist.

Soldering

I received my sensor and found that I needed to solder 10 cables onto 1/4″ x 1/8″ rectangle.  Each cable had to be soldered onto its only area and none of them could be touching.  Being my first time soldering this proved to be an extremely difficult task.  The first two or three went fine, but after that it got crowded and not having the steadiest had didn’t help.  I managed to get them all attached, but in the end it just didn’t work.  As a plan B we took an already made citizen kit that used the same sensor and attempted to work with that and try to get it to work.  Unfortunately that is as far as I got and didn’t manage to load a script or see if the sensor could actually detect any pollution in the air.

 

 

final boards

final_boards

Air pollution is a common problem and can cause health problems.  The freeway running through La Verne is a major source of pollution for that area.  The CO and NO emissions from vehicles can be reduced using systems of vegetation and technical filters.  This sets up for a landscape that filters and reveals the invisible flows of pollution in not only the air, but also water.  Weaving the vegetative and technical filters allows for a multifunctional landscape that acknowledges both air and water pollution.  Dense forests can be created close to the freeway with selective trees that absorb the greatest amounts of CO and NO and then slowly scattering them as it moves further from the freeway while changing the type of pollution filtration to particulate matter or even ozone.  Several water collection, filtration, and conveyance systems can be set up to create a treatment train that moves and cleans water before it is stored or moved to the existing creek.

Finalizing posters

LA 301_ FINAL PRESENTATION-Taylor Olson

The necessity for water conservation and awareness is not unique to La Verne, but this city  does offer unique opportunities to showcase these conservation techniques.  With  multi-use landscape elements and the sloping topography of the region, the design will bridge together the community and the process of water treatment and flow, while simultaneously improving water quality and habitat.  With a focus on water runoff prevention and usage, the design will incorporate the Water Treatment plant, the Marshall creek and the surrounding community in a network of water collection and conservation.  This includes the sensor fountains reflecting water use in the community, water treatment wetlands, native planting bioswales, restored river bed, and strategic corridors between the Treatment plant, river and surrounding residences.  The result will be a sustainable community, involving residential and commercial regions, a more interactive space with recreational opportunities reflecting culture, and beneficial habitat and general environmental improvement.

Sensor Progress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YgMJYSTtqc&feature=youtu.be

After playing with the connection between the arduino and the piezo sensor, along with an amplifier, I was able to produce amplified sound from vibrations picked up by the sensor.  A plastic sheet placed over the speaker, seen above, allowed a small amount of water to receive these subsequent vibrations and translate them into various wave patterns.  Using the arduino Tone code [posted below] along with the ‘pitches.h’ library, I was able to adjust the frequency of the vibration from the speaker and see the different reactions with the water display.

http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/tone

SoCal Maker Con

SoCal Maker Con is a large event that allows people to display different types of technology.  Some of the things found at the event included 3D printing, drones, and robots.  This was my first appearance at Maker Con and it was an interesting one.  At the event I was surprised at the wide range of people attending.  I was most impressed with the children attending and their knowledge of the subject.    I had no idea that Arduino was so widely known.  After  setting up the table and laying everything out I thought it would be a slow day with most people passing by.  I was wrong.  Several people were interested in what we were doing and after about and hour my voice was beginning to fade because I was talking to so many people.  Being at this event also helped me to further my understanding of the Seeeduino and Arduino.

Project Description

The sensor I selected to attempt to attach to the Seeudino Salker is the MICS 4515. This sensor detects CO2 and NO2 from the pollution of automobiles. After some research and some common sense a lot of the air pollution comes from the freeway running through the site. In conjunction with knowing where the majority of air pollution comes from, I looked at wind patterns to determine how it will move across the site. A couple of the major wind patterns looked at were the Santa Anna Winds and the off shore winds. The majority of the time the wind moves from NE to SW or vice versa. These little bits of information along with existing site conditions will help to define my design strategies

First Attempt

This was the first attempt at creating circuits using the Seeeduino Stalker kit and Arduino. Using an instruction card as a guide we were able to take a breadboard and, based on the instructions, different resistors, LED lights and jumper cables. At first glance at the instruction card it seemed confusting, but after about 5 minutes it became very clear and easy as to how to construct the circuit. Once the circuit was built and attached to the Seeeduino Stalker we hooked it up to a laptop. Using Arduino and an already composed sketch we were able to make the LED’s light up. In this case the LED’s blinked in a pattern. Going through the sketch in Arduino we were able to locate the time interval between the LED’s lighting up. By adjusting this value we could increase or decrease the amount of time it took for them to blink. We experimented with values from half a second up to one minute.