Earth Day: Environmental Sensors

Before you attempt to solve a problem, you must first study the problem. If there’s a problem with the environment, you must therefore study the environment at a scale never seen before. For this year’s Hackaday Prize, there are a lot of projects that aim to do just that. Here are a few of them:

[Pure Engineering]’s C12666 Micro Spectrometer has applications ranging from detecting if fruit is ripe, telling you to put sunscreen on, to detecting oil spills. Like the title says, it’s based on the Hamamatsu C12666MA spectrometer, a very tiny MEMS spectrometer that can sort light by wavelength from 340 to 780nm.

The project is to build a proper breakout board for this spectrometer. The best technologies are enabling technologies, and we can’t wait to see all the cool stuff that’s made with this sensor.

[radu.motisan]’s portable environmental monitor isn’t just one sensor, but an entire suite of them. The design of the project includes toxic and flammable gas sensors, radiation detectors, dust sensors, and radiation detectors packaged together in a neat, convenient package.

[radu] has already seen some success with environmental sensors and The Hackaday Prize; last year, his entry, the uRADMonitor placed in the top fifty for creating a global network of radiation sensors.

 

18 thoughts on “Earth Day: Environmental Sensors

    1. It’s 300 for the sensor and Pure Engineering’s breakout board. 50 bucks for a breakout board seems like a lot. I’m not sure why you would need a breakout board, the sensor is breadboard friendly.

  1. “The design of the project includes toxic and flammable gas sensors, radiation detectors, dust sensors, and radiation detectors packaged together in a neat, convenient package”
    When one radiation detector is not enough

    1. It works by using FFT to compare the frequency distribution of a perfectly cooked noodles waviness to the noodles currently being cooked. You can update the library using custom collected fingerprints so that you can use any brand of ramen noodle and not have it give false positives.

      But seriously It just collects scattered light and the way it’s scattered tells you what molecules are invovled. The scattering induces excitation, and thus frequency/color shifts in the light.

      1. The spectrometer has 15 nm resolution, which in this region works out to be ~700 cm^{-1}. That’s not enough to actually get any useful info with Raman scattering. Broader peaks (fluorescence, reflection…) would still be good, though.

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