BioBoard/Equipment

Sensors

We need to decide whether to build them ourselves or whether to buy them ready-made and just worry about assembling the bits and making everything communicate. Important considerations would be affordability, accessibility and required precision.

Thermocouple

Commercial probes are available from approx. $20 upwards for a simple probe http://www.omega.com/ppt/pptsc.asp?ref=HTTC36. There is also a somewhat sketchy Instructable (http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-A-Thermocouple/) for how to build one - at approx. $15, it’s not going to be much cheaper, though, so choosing the DIY version would be mostly for the educational benefit of actually building it (almost) from scratch

pH-meter

Maybe we can buy one of these (or similar), break them open and figure out how to read the output from an arduino:

• HANNA Instruments HI 98103 $55
• Milwaukee pH600 $20 - doesn't look like it needs specific buffers for calibration, but the accuracy is probably not great. Maybe it's enough, though.
• Google shopping results approx. $40 upwards
• SOTA pH Electrode $100 - expensive, but so so sweet: designed for continuous measurement, and comes with any kind of connector.

You can also get little tester units, such as this Jenco 610 pH tester for $30 - perhaps it could be hacked?

There’s also the option of attempting to build one ourselves using this (or a similar) schematic with the Arduino instead of a voltmeter - not necessarily cheaper, although it’d certainly be both fun and informative.

Dissolved oxygen (DO) probes

• DO-BTA Dissolved Oxygen Sensor $209 - cheapest commercial product I could find.

In this case, it seems relatively safe to assume that bulding one ourselves would be cheaper. There is an illustration here of how a DO probe is constructed, but whether we can actually build one or not is of course another question.

Living biomass

This is still an open question on all fronts. Don’t know how much such a sensor would cost, if we’d be able to hack one, and whether building one ourselves is actually a real option.

Controller and data transmission

Is Arduino going to be our platform?

Sensor data collection

Which board would be optimal for our purposes? Does this depend on the sensors?

Wireless data transmission

How? Immediate suggestion would be ethernet shield, but others options are available and perhaps preferable.

Data logging and visualization

Log

Data should be recorded at regular intervals; ‘smoothing’ by logging average values over each interval rather than point values may also be an option. Export to a simple spread sheet arranged to make later data analysis and visualization easy - how to do this?

Graphic visualization

It would be awesome to have the visuals built in from the beginning, as good graphics will greatly increase people's understanding of the correlations between the factors we measure.

Website

A virtual space for the collaboration, organization and publication of the project. So far, this wiki seems to work well for our collaboration and organization purposes, but it may not be the best platform for presenting, sharing and comparing data?