Why Balloons and Kites?
These tools are being developed to provide a low cost, easy to use, and safe methods for making maps and aerial images. Over the last two years, we’ve built a global community of mappers who are engaged in discussion around the development and use of this tool and others....
Infrared cameras for vegetation analysis
Infrared photography can help assess a plant’s health, and has been used on satellites and planes for agricultural and ecological assessment, mainly by vineyards, large farms and large-scale (read: expensive) research projects. By creating a low-cost camera...
Applications
Thermal imaging can be used to document heat/AC leaks from insulation gaps on a building's facade, reveal warmer ground water inflows (either fresh or chemical-laden) or "thermal pollution" from industrial processes entering ocean-temperature waterbodies, as well as identify areas on...
Purpose
Chemists use expensive tools called spectrometers (there are several kinds) to analyze unknown solid or liquid samples. We are working on a cheap version which we hope to use to identify oil contamination in water and soil, as well as a range of other possible toxins.
Spectrometers can also...
Purpose
This tool is being developed to experiment with mapping indoor air quality. A Roomba--the room cleaning vacuum--is programmed to travel all around a room once it is left to roam. Therefore, it is an ideal tool to assess the quality of air through out a room.
We have attached a sensor and...
A kite balloon combines a lifting gas with active lift structures like wings to fly in all conditions. A good design may solve the common difficulty of flying in light winds, which makes balloon mapping difficult, but still falls short of kite-flying weather. It may also help reduce helium use, and...
This kit was created as a means to improve the georeferencing of images captured using balloon mapping. This kit is based around the open-source Arduino mircocontroller. Utilizing a GPS receiver, barometric sensor, three-axis accelerometer and data logger, this module allows for the synchronization...
Basics
We started developing a stereo camera set-up so that we could capture two images simultaeously -- one visible, one infrared (for more on infrared imaging see our near-infrared camera tool). The visible imagery can be stitched normally, or overlaid with the infrared to create NDVI -...
Purpose
This tool is being developed to detect hydrogen sulfide in an affordable, quantifiable manner. In September of 2011, Public Laboratory members, met with residents of Garfield County, Colorado to discuss the growing hydrogen sulfide problem in their small, rural community. Recently, the...
Purpose
This tool is being developed to enable people to test sources of water for the presence of environmental estrogens. An increasing number of structurally diverse chemicals encountered in the environment and common household items have been identified as environmental estrogens, compounds...
Developed during the Water Hackathon on March 23-25 in New York City, the water quality sensor is a multipurpose tool for collecting data remotely. This tool is rapidly changing and is being used as part of the on going research initiative called DontFlush.Me
This tool consists of an Arduino...
The air column monitor is currently in early phases of development. The April 2012 EcoHackII at Parsons in NYC brought together a group of developers, scientists, data visualizers and activists to work on the initial design. This tool is being developed as a partnership between Public Lab and the...
