Project Ideas Needed: Environmental Science with Arduino or Raspberry Pi

Hey Wade.  I am Mike Davis, and I work with the City Colleges of Chicago.  I think you guys have a golden opportunity to do some fun things.

One thing I'd recommend is making use of gspread.  It is something that collects information from a sensor and throws it right into a Google Spreadsheet.  I've been using a Raspberry Pi and a temperature probe for some simple cooling curves.  I think it is perfect for the kind of thing where you can track things like temperature, pressure, CO2, etc over long periods of time.  The next step would be to make a GUI for it, and maybe a dashboard.

This site is a good guide, but you will have to modify some things.  I will be posting instructions soon.

Using sensors you might be able to capture something with your phosphorescent fish.  A Cadmium selenide sensor can be used to detect light.  I think there would be something really interesting there.

Here is something with a boat.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/fish-pi/

You could probably do something with a waterproof camera and a sensor.  Every time something touches it, it would tweet a photo.

Great to virtually meet you Mike! Thanks for the awesome collection of information. gspread sounds like a great place to start, and we just got the ebooks I mentioned in my previous post which talk about projects and types of data to collect.

Your idea with the waterproof camera, sensor and tweet also sounds very interesting. It reminds me of a project being run in Australia to publicly share shark locations via twitter (obviously at a larger scale).

I need to step my skills up (I'm a beginner with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis), so I'm going to work with our teens to create the projects from Make/Google's summer camp. I'll share those here, and then I'll be back with more questions about some of the projects you mentioned.

mcb1  Any ideas from an Arduino perspective?  I know you're kind of an Arduino expert

Nicole

Thanks for the introduction

I have certainly got experience with Arduino, and temperature sensing to either display or control relays.

I haven't done a lot of sending the data out to any servers, but there is no reason not to work out something.

You could use any of the RF units available to send to a central point, for display or out to the internet/local lan.

Peter Oakes has done some very good introductions, along with web

Fast Track to Arduino Programming - Lesson 4a, Ethernet input and response test console

I'm not familiar with either of the camps mentioned (and the search gave me too much info), but if you have certain project in mind, include a link and I'll see if I can help.

I highly recommend this book, which you can download from this link

Arduino Cookbook, 2nd Edition - Free Download eBook - pdf

Section 14 deals with Communication, and Section 15 with Ethernet and webserver.

It's suitable for beginner and experienced.

Mark

Thanks for the input Mark!

Hi All

I just found my way here based on the request for some help with STEM content

I have a reasonable skill set with Arduino, TI Launchpads and Raspberry PI an am not afraid to get my hands dirty with a soldering Iron and some woodworking if needed to build various electronics sensor and control circuits

So please throw out your ideas and lets see what your interested in sharing with your students, its always more productive to have a goal for the project and I'm open to ideas

Oh, I can also program in C# to create GUI windows apps or web pages to demo various analog or Digital sensor data

See: Fast Track to Arduino Programming - Lesson 4a, Ethernet input and response test console for an example

Let the Top Members minions have a new purpose ... Send them back to school

Might be a bit late but this project looks like it could be related to what you are trying to do - Tutorial: Turn your Raspberry Pi into a Hamster Fitness Tracker | Initial StateInitial State |

That's an awesome project!

Hamsters can cover some milage.

One of the best ways to begin looking at issues in the environment is to measure and record the parameters in your local area.

The Arduino provides a great way to set up sensors for data logging over a wide range of sensors.

Next you want to demonstrate how to analyze the data to extract useful information from the mass of data.

That is where your RPi comes in with a wealth of Linux/Unix programs available for data analysis and display.

Then there is the issue of making people aware of the data you have collected and the analysis you have done.

Again, the RPi provides the tool to create and maintain web pages for others to access.

So with just those two basic MCU's, you have all the power you need to explore the environment and document your findings.

All of the issues I have identified have mostly been done, so you get to reuse a lot of software and even sensor/data logging designs from the technical community.

Then you can challenge your students to think of new ways to assess the data, display the findings and how best to distribute the information collected.

So you basically have a whole STEM project just waiting to be implemented.

DAB

Another project you might find interesting is AirPi - http://airpi.es/ this is a raspberry Pi weather station.

There is also a community element with people sharing their AirPi data so you can compare your local results with similar set ups in other locations.