Guides

A major goal of Public Laboratory is to produce simple and easy guides to construct many of our low-cost tools. Here are some of the illustrated guides, tutorials, and other supporting materials we've put together so far:

Aerial mapping

Grassroots Mapping with balloons and kites

• Grassroots Mapping Guide 2.0, (1mb pdf) - This improved version of the guide is more concise (prints on 4 pages, or a single 11x17 sheet, double sided) and has been updated with more recent, simpler, more reliable techniques. It is available for anyone to edit or modify as a Google Doc.
• http://grassrootsmapping.org/guide - Our first illustrated guide attempts to thoroughly explain how to construct and use a balloon mapping kit.
• Step by step slide presentation - all the drawings of the Grassroots Mapping Guide 2.0 shown one at a time on 15 slides. Useful for projecting during rig-building workshops.

Balloon Mapping Quick Start Guide

We made this one specifically for filling and flying our balloon kit, but the flying info is generally applicable.

• BalloonMappingQuickStartGuide1English.pdf (1.5 MB)

Anyone can print, add to or edit the Google Doc, please translate it to new languages if you can!

Balloon Mapping Flight Checklist & Packing Lists

Sequential to-do lists and packing lists for every step of the process. Do it right every time! use a list.

• BAPpre-flightchecklistpackinglist.pdf (66 KB)

Again, anyone can download, print, or edit the Google Doc.

Making Maps with MapKnitter

Public laboratory's open source MapKnitter.org tool:
MapKnitter Guide

Translations

• Castellano/Spanish: Guía ilustrada de hacer mapas con globos o cometas
  • PDF (1mb, 4 pages)
• Portuguese: Guia ilustrado para Mapear Comunidades de base com balões e pipas
  • PDF (1mb, 4 pages)
• Georgian (older 5 page version): PDF (26mb)
• Hebrew מדריך מאוייר למיפוי עצמאי עם בלונים או עפיפונים (older 5 page version): A4 PDF (3.1mb), Letter-sized PDF
• Korean: see research note by Jaekyung Lee
• Chilean: external site
• Ukrainian: Картографування за допомогою
  Повітряних куль та Зміїв (995kb PDF) Google Doc
• Russian: attached PDF
• Turkish/Türkçe: Balon ve Uçurtma ile Haritalama için Resimli Rehber

Spectrometry

• PLOTS DIY Spectrometer Guide v1.0.pdf (2 pages, black and white, 1.4 MB)
• PLOTS DIY Spectrometer construction (wiki page): http://publiclaboratory.org/wiki/video-spectrometer-construction

Older spectrometry guides:

These may be out of date

• Making a spectrometer:
  • plots-spectrometer-guide.pdf (17.4mb)
  • plots-spectrometer-guide-small.pdf (4.3kb)
  • Parts and Crafts revised spectrometry booklet (fantastic!): http://archive.publiclaboratory.org/download/partsandcrafts-spectrometer... (21mb, print quality)

In progress

We're constantly improving and exploring new ways of documenting and disseminating our designs. Here are some prototypes and planning pages:

• T-shirt guide - A t-shirt with instructions for balloon mapping printed on it.

In-progress Translations:

• Arabic: https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AVY4Tg28DhosZGM0OHd6M2RfMjU5Y3o...