Week 6 Day 28

We pulled all of our plant data today, here are the results of our comparison.

It should be noted that the plants caused a drop in the CO2 levels both during the peak times along with during lunch and the overnight period.  

Work continues on the paper and final presentation.

Week 6 Day 26

Today is the day for our threshold tests.  We set up our sensor to take measurements every 30 seconds, let it normalize, and then began assaulting it with different airborne gases and particulates.  The first test was the fumes released from the act of soldering our newest board. (yes, we are creating a new board, i'll get to that in a minute.)  Next, we grabbed some coffee and sat the cup next to the sensor to see what readings we picked up off the fresh grounds.  For the 3rd test we grabbed some hand sanitizer and placed a large sample next to the sensor. The last test consisted of us fumigating the lab with a can of air freshener, seen below.

For the afternoon we grabbed some plants from walmart so we can test the CO2 content of the teachers lab again with the addition of indoor plants.  Also, throughout the day Georgette has been working on our newest wireless board that we will be using for techfest.  Here is her progress.

Week 5 Day 25

This morning Dr. Bruce Hunter brought in three visitors from UAEM, Mexico.  We discussed the differences between the education system in the US vs the education system in Mexico.  It was very interesting to hear that in Mexico there is often a connection between several high schools and one university.  This means that if a student knew they wanted to be a doctor, they could begin the program in high school and then continue on to the university.  We look forward to seeing what other connections can be made between the RET program and the UAEM in Mexico, possibly even heading down to Toluca to experience the culture and participate in some environmental studies  





Here is our current progress on the xbee shield that we are attaching to our prototype so we can transmit data via a wireless sensor network.

Week 5 Day 24

The morning session was spent cleaning up our poster and working on the methods section of our paper.  Chirag spent some more time developing the wireless portion of our sensor and trying to get two of the units to talk to each other.  By the end of the day he was getting data from our sensor from the wireless xbee, but was working on cleaning up some extraneous values.  Hopefully by tomorrow we will be completely wireless.

This afternoon we attended a seminar by Dr. Kuruvilla John on Air Quality Monitoring.  He discussed how air pollution has progressed over time, and the legislation that has been put into place to help monitor the issue.  He also discussed different detection methods for every thing from ozone to particulate matter.  It was very interesting to see several of the parameters that we have investigated for indoor air applied to the outdoor setting.

Week 5 Day 23

Today was spent comparing the data from all of our different locations to see how close our prototype is to the more expensive graywolf unit.  Here is everything we have collected thus far, graywolf data on the left and our prototype on the right.

We also began work on developing the wireless capability of our arduino board.  Here is our progress.

Week 5 Day 22

Today is terrarium day!  We are taking air quality readings from the terrarium downstairs to see how it compares to our other locations.  Here are some pictures of the terrarium and the setup.

We are anticipating a higher relative humidity in this location along with a much lower CO2 concentration.  All of the other readings should come in around the same averages from before.  After we finish collecting today's data we will begin working on the final presentation.

Week 5 Day Day 21

The week started off with a presentation from Dr. Hunter on GPS and GIS.  He explained the basics of how GPS works, along with showing us some state of the art equipment that the university uses for research.  He then introduced us to the arcGIS software that utilizes the collected GPS data.  We went through a short demo  using the program, which allowed us to manipulate the different layers to show relationships between different pieces.  The software makes it very easy to actually use the data and present multiple layers in one location.



The second half of the day was spent working on the engineering side of our lesson plan, specifically writing the design portion of the student activity for an engineering design class.  Our goal is for students to build the prototype unit, and then use their functional unit to sample their schools indoor air quality.