This week in the Public Lab community newsletter, join others interested in water quality monitoring, check out how archival map stitching is being used in Maine and catch up on work that happened with gas flare spectrometry during the barnraising. Enjoy!

Announcements

Pieces by Hagit Keysar and MIkel Maron featured Public Lab-related work in the Tactical Technology Collective’s first issue of Evidence and Influence Micro-Magazine.

Italian television program Ubiq ran a segment about Public Lab (requires Silverlight and is in italian).

Do you have a DIY environmental science project that you'd like to work on with Public Lab? Here's a new page on starting up and suggesting such a project: http://publiclab.org/wiki/new-projects

New Public Lab Google Groups have started. If you're interested in water quality monitoring or development of a potentiostat, consider joining.

Archival map stitching is being combined with balloon mapping in Maine: http://publiclab.org/notes/code4maine/10-07-2013/diy-time-machine

Events

On Tuesday afternoon (October 15), there will be a canoe trip from Harvest Dome to the Gowanus Canal to capture aerial images. For more information or to get involved, contact liz@publiclab.org.

A Cape Cod marsh mapping trip happened this weekend: http://publiclab.org/notes/wward1400/10-09-2013/cartography-primer-no-1-at-pamet-marsh-cape-cod.

On Saturday, Pat Coyle led an Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Regional Workshop in San Diego, running a session on Simple Aerial Photography Mapping with Balloons or Kites. The workshop used Public Lab approaches and examples to show how aerial photomaps can be useful for EWB teams for their projects and the communities they work with.

New and ongoing projects

Continued testing and Barnraising followups for gas flare spectrometry: http://publiclab.org/tag/flare

A new open hardware design for a syringe pump was published by Jack Summers: http://publiclab.org/notes/JSummers/10-08-2013/syringepump-2-3

New wiki pages describing how to do spectrometry sampling (http://publiclab.org/wiki/spectrometry-sampling) and listing things you can do with your spectrometer were posted: http://publiclab.org/wiki/spectrometry-activities

Research Note highlights

1. Sources for Public Lab absorption spectrometry materials (posted by eustatic)
2. Balloon mapping of wetlands near Clayton, NY (posted by nedhorning)
3. Balloon mapping K week (posted by jbreen)
4. Lycopene (posted by cfastie)
5. Modification of camera position on older desktop spectrometer for flare spectrometry (posted by eustatic)
6. Cheap thermal imaging sensor (posted by davidbanks)
7. CCD photodiode array spectrometer (posted by bhickman)
8. NDVI colour sensitivity (posted by bc512)
9. New features and upgrades on Spectral Workbench and PublicLab.org (posted by warren)
10. Oaktober (posted by cfastie)
11. Absorption lines in flare spectra (posted by warren)

As always, if anything was missed, please post a research note or email the list. Have a great week everyone! Shannon

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