Opening May 21 at AT1 Projects, LA

Mathew — Fri, 21 May 2010 02:28:02 +0000

Things have been quiet here on our blog, because we’ve been preparing an exhibition. An essay/text and prototypes of ours will be featured in the Super/Prime Pavilion at Volume, AT1 Projects opening show. Super/Prime is curating a collection of works about transformations in process. We’re excited, but won’t be able to make the opening. If you’re around 3229 Casitas Ave, LA 6-10pm, stop in.

Others in the Super/Prime Pavilion:

Harry Gassel, Brendan Griffiths & Mylinh Nguyen, Riley Hooker, Gary Kachadourian, Brian Randolph, Steven Sarkozy, and Stacia Yeapanis

Monitoring Compost, pt.1 (what we’ve got)

Mathew — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:05:33 +0000

There is no substitute for the complexity of human senses. Quantitative data is cannot stand in for direct experience with compost. But it does provide a means of directly comparing processes and feedstock mixes, as well as real-time feedback for control. Lacking grad students or interns we have only robots to exploit (for now…). To that end, we’ve been prototyping an inexpensive electronic monitoring system.

Our Current System
Once an hour a cheap analog clock wakes up an Arduino from it’s deep, power-saving sleep mode. From the safety of our garage, the Arduino reads the temperature from five Dallas OneWire temperature sensors on a 10′ cable. Using an Ethernet Shield, the Arduino connects through our router to the internet, where it uploads the sensor values to Pachube, and puts itself back to sleep again. Pachube saves the data as XML, which is interpreted by flash widgets on a dashboard.

Download the Arduino code (requires Dallas Temperature Library, OneWireLibrary)

Cloacina Development Blog » monitoring

Opening May 21 at AT1 Projects, LA

Monitoring Compost, pt.1 (what we’ve got)