Week 1 Day 2

We started out today with a change of scenery. Instead of our normal digs over at Discovery Park we met at the Environmental Education Science and Technology (EESAT) building. First on the agenda was an introduction to the director of applied sciences, Dr. Bruce Hunter. After that we rolled through a debriefing session first so that all the teams could get us up to date on how they plan on approaching the problem. Next on the agenda was a tour of the facility. Part of that tour included the renewable energy sources they use to power the greenhouse at EESAT.

 My team and the aquaponics team will actually be meeting at EESAT going forward so that we can have a wet lab. This is a huge improvement over hauling 30 gallons of water into an electrical engineering lab and balancing the buckets on a couple of CPUs... After the tour we broke for lunch and then got back together at Discovery Park. We spent the afternoon in a seminar over control systems that gave us the chance to play with some Lego Mindstorm robots and LabView. After that I bounced through a quick lecture on how to set up a blog so the rest of the teams could be as amazing as we are.

Team Updates:
Aquaponics - They plan on building a three tier system that monitors pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen and water level. They are going to implement control systems for feeding, Dissolved Oxygen and water level.

Air Quality - Step one is going to be simplifying their system that was built last year so that it only focuses on carbon dioxide. The plan on building a model "room" out of Plexiglas and testing different methods for controlling the carbon dioxide levels in that chamber. There was some discussion on whether or not it should be a closed or open system. They also talked about different techniques for monitoring air flow.

Wildlife Monitoring - The drive on this project is monitoring burrowing owls out in El Paso. They are trying to build an inexpensive system using off the shelf parts to accomplish this. Right now the system needs two car batteries and three solar panels to power it. They are hoping to use control systems to set "wake up" conditions to help manage the power with the goal of storing two days worth of power in the batteries and only needing one solar panel to keep it charged.

Robotics - This group is modeling their project off research that is going on for the Mars and Lunar rovers. They are experimenting with robotic communication and collaboration with the goal of getting a leader robot that can use optical sensors to follow a painted path and follower robots that can communicate with it and follow like baby ducks.

Rocket Retrieval - This team is looking at ways to create an locating device that can be flown inside the model rockets used for the IGNITE program. They are planning on using an Arduino, GPS shield and an inexpensive pay-for-use cellphone. They biggest constraint is the need to keep it small and light to work as a payload on these model rockets that tend to be 2 to 5 inches in diameter.