August 25, 2008
World of Wonder Storefront Gallery Hall Monitor
On our walk to get coffee and a sammy an hour or so ago, we peeked in the window of the World of Wonder Storefront Gallery and saw WOW's John Durkin attaching to the wall a tiny blue box with blinking lights that looked like it was designed by an apprentice of Kenny Scharf. We shrugged at him through the glass and continued walking. Upon our return, we found this photo and message from Durkin in our email:
When you saw us in the gallery, we were mounting a device created by the Black Cloud Citizen Scientist League, a collaboration between UC Berkeley scientists and students from LA's Manual Arts High School. This little blue box monitors five environmental variables: light, temperature, noise, co2, and VOCs (Volatile Organic Compouds), and once every minute it sends a text message containing current data to a server. The little box will live in our gallery collecting data for one week. You can explore the data the group has collected so far at this website. To get in, fill in these items in the drop-down list:
Light
Temp
Noise
CO2
VOCs
On Saturday, I attended a class at Machine Project Art Gallery in Echo Park, where the scientists from Berkley showed us how to build our own VOCs / light sensors using an arduino board (http://www.arduino.cc) and some parts from Radio Shack. We also learned how to display the data collected by our sensors on our computers using processing. I will be building other robots using these techniques during my copious free time.
– John Durkin
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