N.O.W.

What We want to do

We are a group of middle school students (15 years old) from Farsund, Norway led by our science teacher, Per Verås. We are seeking to develop an open source multi-platform system that is easily reproducable, low -cost, and that measures water quality.

Our project has a goal something similiar to the RIFFLE Open Water Project with modifications appropriate to our area of the world. We are also looking at projects such as http://publiclab.org/wiki/coqui which uses sound as a platform.

Part of this project will involve using a drone as a tool in collecting data in measuring water quality.

Our goal is for other schools in Norway to reproduce and modify our approach, so that student-scientists can help in the development of sensors that monitor parameters such as water temperature, conductivity, and ph using inexpensive components.

Our approach will be Arduino based, using low cost materials. This project has been inspired, in part, by a similar project known as RIFFLE. See https://github.com/OpenWaterProject/riffle

Last year our water project entitled "CumuloNimbus" won first place in Norway in the Stockholm Junior Water Competition. In that project we sent a high altitude weather balloon to 33 kilometers in the upper stratosphere and measured the altitude of the polar jet streams over Norway using audio signals.

Picture taken 210 minutes after launch from our first High Altitude Mission, White Eagle One. Notice the sun drenched Norwegian coastline.

Our attempt and results

Our project is in early development. We will be posting updates to this page as we formalize our project.

We will breadboard our project using FRITZING http://fritzing.org/download/?donation=0 and AUTODESK for CAD prototyping for our sensor housing. http://aidp.phoenixeducom.com/mindmap-site.php. Also see http://www.123dapp.com/design

Manylabs also has some tools we will likely use. Many Labs

Because we have been very active in high altitiude ballooning, with several launches to 33 kilometers in the last four years, we want to develop sensors that can also be launched to near space. A link to our Space Balloon Website is found here Norway Space Balloon

We will be participating in the Global Space Balloon Challenge from Stanford University in California with our school team from Farsund known as THOR-2. We will simultaneously be developing a platform for measuring temperature, barometric pressure, and other types of sensors, for our sixth launch to Near Space in April, 2015. Global Space Balloon Challenge

Multi-platform, relatively low cost wireless sensors, Arduino based, launched by high altitude balloons, and drones, are our present and future focus.

Questions and next steps

Our initial focus will simply be to learn basic Arduino programming. We are using the Arduino Uno from the Sparkfun Inventor's kit, and are in the process of learning basic programming skills.

In this early stage we have some simple goals. In the next several weeks we will create a pilot project around temperature sensing, and post our progress on this website.

Why We are interested

We are interested in engaging other students and teachers here in Norway in an attempt to motivate them to engage in challenging, open air activities that have as their focus the environment-and here in Norway nothing can be more important than securing clean water.

Engaging student scientists to measure simple parameters that attempt to measure water quality.

Links to Software Resources and Simulation

http://123d.circuits.io/circuits http://openjscad.org/#

Links to Water Related Sources

Nordic Baltic Seminar 2012 Presentation

Links to our other School Projects

We will add links to our other projects here.

Follow us on Twitter. NewtonGjengen Twitter

IN NORWEGIAN-FROM OUR REPORT S.O.S.

SOS23.pdf

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