Safe and Sound - Invisible Hazards Project Spin-offs - blog 20

15 Jun 2017

This week I've been sidetracked on a bit of a tangent to my build project.

I was asked to make a presentation on invisible hazardous environmental factors.

All I can say is the grapevine works in mysterious ways.

Anyway I put together a 1 hour multi media presentation along with a show-and-tell demonstration of my instrumentation.

The demo activity was beamed up onto the big screen using live video, so everyone could see the meters in giant scale going crazy when my cell phone was taken out of airplane mode.

I wasn't trying to scare anybody, but there was quite a gasp from the audience when the RF strength went full scale red, similar to this video. (so I threw in some damage control)

It was a little surprising to me to see so much interest in the topic - the room was full and there were lots of questions and lots of comments about how much they were learning.

I will try an attach the Powerpoint presentation to this blog in case anyone wants to have a look at it or use it, although I didn't stick to the script and I mixed in lots of hardware demonstrations.

On another front, I had mentioned one of my neighbors was doing a lot of "green" things to his house including connecting the aluminum siding as a shield. I was going to get over there, do an "audit" and take some photos, but our schedules weren't matching up. So I loaned him some instruments and he performed his own audit. Unfortunately he has not yet sent me his readings or pictures, but he did provide a report highlighting things that concerned him. The 2 largest readings he found in his house came from his microwave oven and his cordless phone. (I also found my cordless phone was high 24-7, so I dumped it and went back to wired) He also found some hot spots in his house that he couldn't explain. One surprise was his new vehicle which has some kind of On-Star wireless system. The readings were extremely high in the passenger seat for some reason. This is not a scientific study - just anecdotal data, but it was enough to get him to want to immediately buy his own set of instruments.

Unfortunately not a lot of new images this week, so here is an unpublished image. It shows the power consumption of the two custom modules.