Day 29

Wednesday had the same daily deliverables as the previous days of the week. I arrived to see one thousand feet of UTP Cat 5 outdoor cable sitting on the table, knowing that I will be the sole person working with it. Yay, gifts for me. Accompanying the Cat5 were an abundance of waterproof temperature sensors. We resorted to purchasing them because it will be better in the long run, despite all of our attempts at waterproofing. At least we tried. We had to know that ones we built weren't going to be more efficient than ones we bought.

I spent most of the day messing around with the website we are building. Much excitement about that. It's taking longer than expected, but no worries. It's going to have a cool video on us that I made, a link to our blog, some bios on the team, and information on what we're doing, as well as contact information. There will be a place where you can set up emails to send,which come directly to me so send me an email to say hi. We are hoping to include the final draft of our written report on there for you all to see too. A full write up of how we created SUSAN will eventually be included as well, once it's actually written. We bought our domain name from Go Daddy and are using they're hosting and website building templates as well. Seems to be fine. It cost $72 for a year. We are starting to feel official.

At 11am, we had a meeting with Kaley Krick. She is a representative for Ignite LU, which is an outreach program to alumni for funds to help projects such as ours. She explained to us that some groups have received $0.00 and some are up to $17,000. It all depends on how much effort you put into it, and that no money is guaranteed. She suggested we reach out to family and friends first for donations, to help build us a foundation. Once we establish a donation account, we will be accepting all donations from generous people such as our blog followers. Funds will go to products pertinent to our project, such as a pickup truck, pieces of SUSAN's technology, Solar Panels, tarps for our compost pile, a wheelbarrow, and such the like. More donation information will be available once the site is running, and once we get accepted by Ignite LU. They do not accept all projects, and are very exclusive about which ones they do pick. They want projects that will have a positive influence on the Lehigh Community, which she expressed that our's would have. All we can do is fill out the application and wait. So, more info to  come on this matter.

I spent the rest of the day proof-reading the Final Draft of our report. Have to make sure it's as professional as possible so we are taken seriously. Nothing says treat us like children more than a grammatically incorrect paper. No comma will be spared.

Today is a day of SUSAN. I will be soldering away like a slave all day. They are airing the USA vs. Germany World Cup game today at the Mountaintop @ noon. How lucky are we. GO America. Ben will be working on the online application for Ignite LU, and Alec is driving Tori to the doctor because she got something stuck in her eye. Becca will be acting as a guest visitor and secretary today. woop.

Day 26-28

Friday turned into a bust, and we ended up getting no work done. But, since this is a fellowship, we are learning things. We are learning that some days, you just can't get anything done, and you need to take a break. So that's what we did.

Monday we go our act together a bit . We had four daily deliverables; Written Report with Cost, Susan version 1.0 talking to Xively, Define Project Deliverables, and Order things.

The Project Deliverables included SUSAN -- with full documentation, a Written Report including interested parties, costs, options, and suggestion models. We had to estimate every cost we thought we would need, and then we have to email it to Delicia to get it looked at and approved, and Next Steps, which have yet to be determined, but will include everything for the Fall Semester.

We left SUSAN running overnight Monday into Tuesday, connected to Xively, and she worked. She stayed connected to the internet sending data. Our soil moisture sensors were in cups of dirt, and our temperature sensor was out. We connected two soil moisture probes, and three temperature sensors, but only got readings from two of the temperature sensors and both soil ones.

The written report is looking good, it's approximately 20 pages long, even has a table of contents. boom. It includes every possible aspect of a business plan for the composting site, short term and long.

We had a phone interview yesterday, our second one, with a guy named Nate who works for a scientific magazine. He's super interested in our project, which is awesome. We also had someone come in and film us. Not exactly sure about what, but she filmed us doing things like writing on our board and everyday stuff.  We are receiving some pretty positive publicity, which might help us in our final case.

My job today is to blog (hi) and get us a website started that isn't through blogger, ie. go daddy or one
Web Hosting. Not sure exactly what I'm going to do yet, but Alec has a few things in mind for me to do.

The rest of the group went down to Rathbone Dining Hall to pick up some food waste so we can increase our volume. I'm assuming we will be doing more composting today, as well as working on printing a 3D model body for SUSAN, and finalizing our working draft report.

Lots of work to do, and we are done for the summer on next Thursday, so lots of planning is needed still.

Day 25

Wednesday was a good day. All morning we worked on the institutional model I explained yesterday. Organizing and preparing, we needed to get ready to play in the big leagues and have people take us seriously. I sent a whole bunch of e-mails, to step our game up and get some support from professors. We all picked topics and worked through to the afternoon. Our project advisor Mark Orrs came by around noon with pizza for all of the groups he oversees. We got to chat with them and hear about their projects. After lunch we split up, Alec and I to Rathbone and Tori and Ben to the garden. At Rathbone, we didn't find Joe or Kristin who we were looking for, but we did find food waste. We are supposed to be taking food waste from there and incorporating it into our pile. Unfortunately, the food waste that was there had too much plastic in it for us to take. Screening out plastics would be one of the hardest things we had to do, and weren't ready to tackle that.

Not sure what the plastic was from, but filtering it out is a necessity or we won't be able to use any of the food waste. At the garden, Ben and Tori were setting up the generator to power the hose so we could soak our pile, but they hadn't quite figured it out by the time we got there. I got it started no problem and we were watering away. After Alec forgot the food waste we did have at Mountain Top and running back for it, we got to turning the pile. It. was. HOT. Sweating and turning and bugs and hoses, it was summer in a garden alright. We tried to finish as quickly as possible, and at 10:20am the next day blogging, I can still smell the dirt and decaying food waste. 

Today, Thursday June 19th, IS ALEC'S BIRTHDAY!! happy birthday ring leader. You always keep me motivated. Thursday is also a SUSAN day. So we get to play with robots and eat cupcakes all day YAY. 

Days 22-24

We didn't work on Friday seeing as Alec was home in Wisconsin for the weekend. Then we worked for about an hour on Monday because Alec missed his flight back because he was eating BBQ ribs and got carried away. Oh Alec. Tuesday was an institutional day. We worked with flow charts and a ton of write ups. Trying to come up with every possibility for every aspect of this project in order to have a solid presentation to Lehigh. Our topics are Location, Staffing, Methods, Feed Stock, Regulations, Use of Compost, and Research Possibilities for PhDs. Location has three possibilities, indoors, by the community garden now, or at another site off by the highway. Methods are in-vessel, out-of-vessel, or out-of-vessel static aerated pile. Feed Stock is made up of our multi-phase plan to start small and steady, and slowly add more and more places on campus until we are 100% green. Staffing could be fully staffed, fully student run, or ran by a 3rd party contracted source. Research opportunities is basically a list of professors and doctors that would possibly want to support our project and conduct research if it was fully functioning. Regulations I don't even want to touch. There's permit-by-rule, which means we don't need an actual permit as long as we follow all of the rules while we're composting. There's general permits to even have the facility, and permits for composting off campus food, as well as environmental protection permits. No thanks. Lots of e-mailing was involved for Tuesday. We didn't even have time to compost.

So that leads us to today, still writing our little institutional model. We will be composting later. Mark Orrs is bringing in free pizza for all of his groups. Wahoo! We are hoping to have a prototype of SUSAN by friday. Like a fully functioning SUSAN. With a 3D printed body, and all of her probes plugged into one Arduino and working. We'll see how that goes seeing as Ben won't be here on Friday. Weird to think that we have two and a half weeks left.

Day 21

Wednesday was a SUSAN day. SUSAN days are my favorite. Before I get into what we did, I'm going to give you a summary of SUSAN that Alec wrote up: 

We’ve talked a bit about her, but I think SUSAN really deserves a formal introduction. SUSAN stands for Sensors Using Sustainability Arduino Network, and is our robot that will help us keep track of our compost system.

                SUSAN came about through two slightly separate thought processes. First, we realized that because of our group’s academic interests, we are placed in a unique position. We are a composting project, of course, but half of our team is studying computers in one capacity or another, and the other half is at least slightly familiar with the basics. In those first few days of the project, while holed up in our affectionately termed “glass box”, we decided it made the most sense to put the things we’ve learned to use in this project. So, in that way, we were looking for technical solutions to either “food waste processing” as a whole, or any part of it that could be improved.

                The next part of SUSAN’s origin lies in my favorite creativity technique, called painstorming. There’s a lot of ways to do it, but in a nutshell, you look at a system or a process or a product and say, “what sucks about ____”. In a proper painstorming session, one would watch or take video of people performing tasks without their knowledge. The idea is that you are recognizing pains that most people wouldn’t self-identify. A classic example is the automatic trunk opener on a car. One would only have to watch a mother loading her three children into her van after soccer practice to realize that opening the trunk while managing her children and gear is a huge pain. Were you to ask that mother what the biggest issue with loading her kids into the van is, she would be more likely to identify her kids yelling or the fact that they have too much stuff, and not the trunk.  For SUSAN, it was much easier to recognize our pains. While learning all about the science of composting, we identified a short list of data and measurements that would indicate the health of our pile. Logically, then, we looked into ways to measure this in real-time. There were are few commercial systems out there that did some or most of what we wanted, but we would have wiped out our budget even buying one part of them. So, we decided to build our own.

                The construction of SUSAN follows a few guidelines. First, we want everything to be completely open source, both because we want others to be able to easily recreate what we have done, and because if we ever get stuck or something goes wrong, it will be easy to fix. Next, we want her to be self-contained and automatic, because it doesn’t make sense to only know the health of the pile when you are near the pile, especially because that is such a hassle on Lehigh’s elevationally segregated campus. To achieve this, SUSAN will be entirely powered by solar panels and will automatically send data over GPRS to Xively, our data aggregating website (assuming they learn to play nicely, that is). We want SUSAN to be modular:  we want to be able to swap out components, easily upgrade her, and make her expandable. This will also help with maintenance. Should our GRPS board fry, for example, we can replace that one component without tearing the entire system apart. Lastly, we want her to be pretty. If you have the opportunity to create something, it might was well be visually interesting. We’re not quite sure what she will look like yet, but we have noticed that a scarecrow might help keep some of the birds away from our compost…

Wednesday we did a few key things. I soldered together a temperature sensor on regular 6 foot hookup wire but added a 1-microfarad capacitor in series with a 100 ohm resistor connected to both the ground and v-out wires. This should help get rid of "noise" in the wire, or things that make readings not precise. The difference in precision and accuracy is that accuracy is close to the answer, but not close to the other answers, and precision is that all your answers are close together, regardless of how close they are to the correct answer. With some of our temperature sensors, we were getting accurate answers but not precise. Meaning we would get all sorts of values ranging between 23 and 27 for example when reading the temperature in a room. We want the most precise answers we can get, and hopefully the most accurate. But precision is what counts. Making sure all the noise is gone, and we are getting consistent results. Today I will be working on some code algorithms to try and get the best readings using an average of about 20 readings, every half second. I'm trying to see how many readings we should take and average in that half second to get accurate and precise results, as well as have the best use of power. I need to find a happy medium in efficiency and power savings. 

Ben got two sensors talking to Xively at once, which has been an enormous battle. Such smart. So computers. Much work. This means we can have two sensors running and sending data at once. His next goal is to get Xively to communicate with our e-mails and cellphones, sending us alerts about the data. 

Alec is working on soil moisture temperatures. He successfully got long-distance sensors to precisely and accurately read with up to 25 feet of cable. Today he will be doing more soil moisture sensors. Not too sure what, but he'll find something. Maybe he can help Tori.

Tori has been working on getting Solid Works on her computer, and probably will be through the rest of the week. It's used to make models on the computer to upload to 3-D printers. 3-D printers are absolute genius. She is designing a prototype model for what we want the physical body of SUSAN to be. It might end up being something like a scarecrow, but who knows... 

Day 20

Tuesday began at 9am in the misty, muggy, buggy, wet community garden. We were meeting a reporter and a photographer to get interviewed and photographed. We're hoping to gain some publicity which will hopefully add to our credibility. The two of them stood, photographed, took notes, asked questions, and genuinely seemed impressed while the four of us uncovered, turned, measured, added to, and covered our pile, seemingly unfazed by the local rodents. We were questioned about the grants we received (which add up to $17,100 total), about the science of our pile, and where we hoped to see it in the future. Relatively harmless, and quickly we wrapped it up as we finished turning our pile. Said goodbyes and see ya soons, and we went back to Mountain Top.

The amount of work we got done was relatively negligible, but I scheduled us what became one of our most important meetings we've had thus far. At 1:30pm we were due to talk to Kristin from Sodexo who is the Director of Dining Services and alternately the Sustainability Coordinator. She was so enthused to meet us. Our hour meeting flew by, and it was full of brainstorming ideas to help make Lehigh's campus better. The meeting actually inspired me to want to change part of my major so I would be Computer Science Engineering and Sustainability. With our hopes and our heads up, we left Brodhead for a quick debriefing, and called it a day.

Wednesday is Burrito Day. Get ready.

Days 18 and 19

Friday we worked on SUSAN a bunch more, following the same general path we did on Thursday. Once the day came to an end, we outline everything we've worked on with SUSAN thus far. It started with every temperature sensor we created. It ranged from the first prototypes we made in PVC pipe and electrical tape, to the most recent 6 foot shielded vs. unshielded wires. After writing out every temperature sensor we've made and analyzing them, a shielded wire with a 10k resistor seems to be our next best bet. We also want to try and incorporate capacitors as well as op-amps to try and better our output. A lack of voltage couple potentially give us skewed results. We are going to try and bring more power on Wednesday when we work on SUSAN again. We wrote out all of the moisture sensors we created and tested (which wasn't that many) and tried to see the best way to continue ahead. We need to do more exploring with those.

Next we planned out the next week, our fifth week of work, and made a list of people we needed to contact. Heading into Monday morning, we had THREE meetings we had to attend. Our first meeting was supposed to be at 11:30am but got pushed back to noon with a reporter for the school website. We had met her once before on the second week of our project, and were happy to talk to her again. She will be at our photo shoot tomorrow that we are having at the garden tomorrow. It's gonna be a blast.

We broke for lunch at 1 after our meeting, and then had a meeting with one of our (sort of) advisors, Delicia. Delicia is the sustainability representative for Lehigh University, so she's pretty official. She's going to help us get our act together and look like adults when we present our project to the head honchos. We presented her with two of our proposed business outlines for who would collect, transport, add, turn, and manage our food waste and compost pile. She gave us helpful insight, and at 2:55 we realized we were late with out next meeting with our actual advisor, Mark Orrs. Low and behold, Mark was an hour late for our meeting (which was supposed to be at 3). So no harm no foul.

After chatting with Mark a bit about the general idea of our project, we headed down to compost. We ran into a friend of mine, Emily Gibbs, who is making her own compost pile for the garden with some other members. We found some sprouts coming out of our pile, and I'm not honestly sure what that means, but it can't be a bad thing. Some of the paper plates that were in there are finally starting to break down. The forks and knives, not so much. They really need to be put through a pulper to properly break down. Our pile is looking moist and isn't incredibly smelly, so we are looking pretty good so far. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, hopefully we can get some moisture up in there and keep it wet so we don't have to set up the generator and water it ourselves.

Tuesday is photo shoot, lots of composting, maybe a drive to Target. All good things to come.

Day 17

Lehigh is absurd. They spent so much money buying fancy tables and speakers and lights and chairs and flowers and plants and couches for the Board of Trustees dinner reception held at Mountain top C building. This building is a warehouse. We literally come and work in a warehouse all day. But they wanted to make it pretty to make them think we work in this fancy place with couches and lights. But Friday morning, they're all gonna be taken away back to the rental place. So sad.

We arrived at 9:30, and got to work on SUSAN alllllll day. Alec was working on getting a moisture sensor to work. It reads how much water is in whatever you put against the tip of the sensor. For example, the air would be zero (relatively), a glass of water would be 100, and the soil in the potted plants would be around 50-80. He got it working relatively quickly. We ran an experiment while we went to Chipotle for dinner, he left the probe in one of the potted plants the entire time we were gone. It failed. We have yet to figure out why.

Tori opted out of technological work but looked at so many regulations and laws that if I did it, it would make my head explode. Good thing we have her to do that. She's actually interested in it as well.

Ben is our tech guy. He was in charge of trying to get our Arduino boards talking to a website called Xively. It records all the data and allows us to access it via wifi. His job is proving pretty tough, but it's the only thing we have him working on right now.

I was in charge of all hands on stuff. I got to solder all of the wires and make all the prototypes for our waterproofed temperature sensors. I got to caulk and saw and solder and get really messy and I loved it. We got the temperature sensor prototype working dipped in a glass of warm water. It reads the same temperature as the real thermometer, which is a miracle because in order to solder them, the sensors get up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. I absolutely thought I fried them when I was soldering them. We also learned that if you stick the tip of the sensor in the water two things happen. 1) You do NOT get electrocuted 2) it works. So that's also something to thing about and experiment.

At the Board of Trustees reception last year, someone donated $20 Million. They tried to spruce up the place and have us all here talking about our projects in hopes for more donations. I hope we shmoozed them enough to make them want to make it rain. We'll see.

Friday we will be working again on SUSAN, and doing a little bit of composting.

Day 16

Wednesday, the second best day of the week. We spared no time in getting down to business with our institutional model outlines. We planned every step of the way, from the foodwaste starting at Rathbone (or any other source depending on the model) to the final curing process of the compost. We made several different models using a variety of different options under each category until we found one that we think was the most optimal.

Between our model making, we did some composting as usual. The rats were still there, it was still smelly, and I still go mosquito bites. We managed to weigh all of the buckets of food waste (after forgetting the scale and running back for it), add them to the pile, take the piles temperature, and cover the pile. We started keeping track of variables such as air temp, pile temp (3 locations), food waste in kilograms, and number of brown waste buckets we used (aka wood chips). We hope to come up with a solid method for making decent compost. Our ratio of food waste to brown waste is currently 1:1 due to the massive about of brown waste in our pile already, but our goal is to add 3 parts brown matter to every 1 part food waste.

Our plan for Thursday is to work a bunch on our SUSAN technology. Our goals are to get it talking to Xively, make a prototype of our temperature sensors, look at moisture sensors, test shielded wire, the physical construction of SUSAN, and research solar panels and estimate costs. Hefty loads for today, but I'll let you know how it goes.

Day 15

Tuesday this week, we learned the definition of a Farmer's Tan. It was 80, we had shovels, and we had work to do. First we had to move two pickup truck loads of wood chips from one site to another. With just shovels and people. After loading and unloading woodchips from our friend's pick up truck, we needed to turn our pile. Woodchips are good "brown matter" for our compost pile. Brown matter is a carbon source that helps balance the C:N ratio of a compost pile. Woodchips just happen to be really accessible so we use those. Next we had to plug in the generator and power the water source to water our pile. You know, moisture levels and such. It was a lot easier than when Jason showed us. We just got information the He is no longer working for the community garden and can't really help us, he has his own farm to manage. Sad but cool for him. After we got the generator working, we took all the bags of garbage (from the Alumni weekend they INSISTED on composting but it was actually all garbage) and put them in the truck and took them to some dumpsters. Well done, alumni weekend. thanks for playing, try again next year. We got out pile turned, watered, and covered, and we decided to break for lunch. And by lunch I mean showers. Lots of shower.

The afternoon was spent planning on what we would do for the rest of the week. We also came up with a list of all of the components of our plan for the Fall Semester. It's pretty thorough, but it has to be or we won't be very successful. It includes:

1) Pick food waste stream (Rathbone, Brodhead?, Cort?, off campus?)
2) Collection (5 gal buckets, 40 gallon buckets, compostable bags, student collection, Sodexo, Brickman/ABM)
3) Transportation (Lehigh does NOT have trucks or frontloaders...(Brickman?) student hauling (Amber?), outside contractor (aliens?))
4) Added to the pile (students, sustainability interns, LUPD, Brickman?, outside contractor
5)Management of the pile (Student, sustainability interns, outside contractor, labor, management -->us, science --> us)
6) Curing (see transportation)
7)Use - Brickman(figure out permitting)

granted some of these are jokes, we have a lot more expanding to do on these subjects. We plan on doing that on Wednesday.

Day 13

Friday is hands down the best day of the week. Not only because we have the weekend to look forward to, but this friday was particularly special because we got our first paychecks today. We spent most of the day working with our (now 3) Arduino boards. They're proving to be more complex than we initially thought. Connecting them to an internet source such as Xively to keep track of data is especially difficult. We are building prototypes for our temperature sensors, and we tried the caulk for waterproofing, but its too soft. We ordered test tubes to try and put the sensors in before putting them in the PVC. I suppose pictures would be helpful to describe this but we didn't take many today.

We ordered a pizza for lunch, and then discussed logistics of our project, and SUSAN, and regulations and laws and permits we need to be aware of. We made a plan for next week (week 4) and it involves getting a lot of professors and faculty on board with our project. That's really going to help boost our credibility and value.

During some down time, I was elected to go add coffee grounds to the compost pile and turn it by myself. Seeing as how much I love working with the compost pile, let's just say I had a greaaat time. There were rats, and flies, and it was hot. Luckily, it didn't smell as badly as I thought it was going to. It was quite an arm workout though. Doing the work we did with four people the other day with one pitchfork by myself took quite a while. In hindsight (and actually I saw this at the time) at least 2 people should turn the pile at a time if it's getting done manually.

Day 12

I picked up Ben this morning with two 5-lb buckets full of food waste from Brodhead. Difficult to explain my excitement. Alec was twenty minutes late because he was picking up a second arduino from a friend, so Tori, Ben and I spent those twenty (well.. twelve, because let's face it I was late) minutes playing with remote controlled helicopters. We got down to business working on rules, regulations, and an overall game plan for the upcoming weeks. Not that we were discouraged from Tuesday's meeting, the opposite actually, we knew we needed to step our game up to play in the big leagues. We took a visit to our main support system, Bill Best. He let us stay and chat for upwards of 45 minutes before parting with a few inspiring words, "just have fun with it" and "don't stop what you were doing just because they told you to". He's one of my favorite people on the planet.

We had a 12:30 meeting with Jason at the garden, and a 1pm appointment at Wilbur Powerhouse to use the soldering equipment. Being short for time, we figured we would skip lunch and leave early. How wrong we were. Worst decision our group has ever made in hindsight. But, after our meeting with Best, we set off to the garden for a rousing hour of composting. Unloading, dumping, turning, pitchforks, wild rats, ants, garbage, mold, dirt, hay, shovels, garbage, woodchips, oh and did I mention other people's garabage?! I'll be amazed when I see this pile of junk and food waste and paper plates turn into usable fertilizer. After turning the pile and adding our new food waste, we removed all of the non-compostable utensils by hand and put them in a bucket. We piled it high, and put the tarp back on, leaving the wild rats to come and go as they please in peace. We waited for Jase, the garden guy, to come show us how to use the generator to power the water supply. It was nifty to see, and cool they let us use all their facilities on our own. Adult problems. Once we were through there, we headed to Wilbur.

Stomachs grumbling, we hit the ground running, not knowing a single thing about soldering. Two hours later, we had some pretty wicked setups going on. Soldering little teeny tiny temperature sensors to 20-ft wires and have them still work and give accurate readings is very promising for the upcoming steps of creating SUSAN. I can't wait until tomorrow where hopefully we make a functioning prototype model using the PVC and caulk again. Still working on waterproofing it.

I edited an entire video of what we did today, but due to youtube copyright issues, I couldn't upload it without it being muted. I'm not sure how to avoid this problem, but it's very, very frustrating. So, instead, here are some pictures from today.

Days 10 and 11

We didn't come in the Monday after Memorial Day weekend, but that Tuesday was our big meeting. In the morning, we went to the community garden to play around with the compost pile currently there from the Alumni meeting a couple weeks ago. It's basically a pile of garbage. All of it isn't even compostable. Some cups there aren't even recyclable. Tisk Tisk. We sorted through what we could, and threw out the rest.

Our meeting began at 4pm, and we got there at 3:30 to be early. Three of our advisors came to listen in and provide some adult backup for us, and the other three men (one quite late) were all from Facilities Services. They gave us the very realistic, real world, numbers and bottom-line approach towards our project. Not that they were discouraging us intentionally, but nothing they were saying made our end goal seem realistic whatsoever. What we got out of that meeting was a few things, Regulations and permits are important, and we aren't going to get anywhere without a business proposition, that has costs and deficits and profits and all that jazz. Basically we have to show them that they're gonna make money on it, and that it's regulated properly so it won't give them bad press, and we'll be a success. That's the dream. However, we decided to redefine our success. If we go farther than the last group did with composting, and actually creates a small-scale system that lasts throughout the summer and next semester, then we will be happy.

 We've taken to furthering our experimentation with Arduino technology, and today we played with a lot of wires and wire cutters and saws and PVC pipe and caulk and temperature sensors, making some sweet temperature probes. Ben was our computer guy, making testing to see if any of our creations actually worked with the Arduino board. Some did, some didn't. We have the issue of connecting little teeny tiny wires together. We tried wrapping them around each other and then taping them with duct table and electrical tape. Only mild success. It didn't really work. We also are faced with the challenge of waterproofing our sensors. Let me explain these to you. They are smaller than the round-face of a dime. they are smaller than one of my fingernails whole. They're really really small. And we have to stick them into compost piles and have them be able to read temperatures and soil moisture levels. So, we are definitely going to be working on this more. I'll get back to you on that.

Earlier today, we spent an hour in the pouring rain shoveling woodchips into the back of a pick-up truck, and then out of the truck into the garden. That's dedication. It wasn't even our truck, it was our friend Amber's. ( Thanks Amber!) Alec took a wrong step and flipped backwards out of the side of the truck into the grass. Oops. It looked like it hurt. Sorry Alec.

More to come in the next week, including pay checks! ;) and pictures.

Day 9

Today was such a long day. It began at 9:04am when I arrived, oatmeal bowl in hand, to pick up the group to go shopping. We made a list, and with our allotted budget from the school, set off to Lowe's Home Improvement Store. It absolutely did not disappoint. 

We purchased:

--(8)- five gallon buckets with lids for compost collection, Blue with the Lowe's logo on it. 

--PVC pipe (which I learned stands for Polyvinyl Chloride) to make some SUSAN prototypes *

--Spray paint (For the buckets)

--Caulk. Which rhymes with Chalk. Which is used as a sealant for leaks and such (also going towards SUSAN). 

--A Caulk Gun(for application of the Caulk). 

--copper wire 

Glenn, the Lowe's employee working the register, was having a particularly hard time ringing us up. He accidentally rang us up for nine buckets instead of eight, so we got an extra bucket.. That we paid for.. Oh well. The more the merrier I suppose. We took our goods and headed back to our growing and increasingly messy workspace at Mountain Top C. I sat and put pennies in chronological order. Post-penny operation, we came up with a "one page" for our huge important meeting on Tuesday. A one page is something to guide our discussion so we make optimal use of our time, including a brief description of our project and the questions we have to ask for them. The meeting consists of like four people who are way more important than we are, from Facilities Services and other places. We are going to pitch them our idea and see if we can get their input, opinion, and possible problems they can foresee for the project. We are taking the day off Monday since it's a holiday to be home with our families, so tomorrow is our last day to prep for our meeting. Utilizing Google Drive's shared documents, we all got to type on one document at the same time. It got a little hairy, but we got it done. Or, at least, a rough draft of it got done. We can finalize it more tomorrow and Tuesday morning. 

We took a break for lunch, and after being requested to bring scissors, I could tell the second half of the day would be more riveting than the first half. I brought Becca along for the fun because I knew it was going to be good. We were spray painting today. Though dangerous, I think we managed not to get paint in too many places we weren't supposed to. Painted our buckets so we can put them places and they can look pretty and advertise our project. Yellow recycle symbols were designed and cut out by me, spray painted by me and Ben on the lids. Tori designed the "grow" letters and I spray painted those as well onto the buckets. My entire hand was green by the end of it. Talk about getting a green thumb, the wrong way. It then started thunder storming and hailing, and we called it a day. 

Now, to explain SUSAN. Sensors Using Sustainability Arduino Networks. We are creating thermometers, soil moisture gauges, and possibly oxygen level gauges. Hopefully we can implement this in our Alpha Test Phase, sticking it in the compost pile for readings. We are using most of the stuff we bought today to create prototypes. We need tiny little sensors to be surrounded by PVC pipe and caulked in so they are waterproof and connect with wires to the Arduino board, linked to a network where we can monitor them wirelessly. It's a big task, but with composting being a painstakingly long process, we needed a side project. We hope it will add significant value. 

I hope tomorrow we get to take a half day, and get all of our work done in the morning and early afternoon. Here's to dreaming. 

Some sort of sick joke 

Day Eight

Daily Deliverables

--Play with Arduino

--Design of Garden Robot 

The eighth day of the Grow Project began with almost everyone on time ( I was a few minutes late because of Oatmeal, and the bus neglected to drop Ben off at our building.. again). Somebody should really get on that bus situation. I placed my Cheez-It box down beside Alec's complicated-looking kit, and we worked to grind out some results. Ben and I messed around with the Arduino for two and a half hours. An Arduino is a single-board microcontroller, intended to make the application of interactive objects or environments more accessible. That's Google's definition, copied and pasted. I can only further explain it by telling you some of the applications we tried today. The Arduino and the breadboard (the white part with all the holes) connect to the computer, where you type some code to tell it what to do. Then, if you set it up correctly, something cool should happen. So, we got an LED light to flash, we set up a button to control the flashing LED light, and we set up a potentiometer (a dial that turns) to adjust a 3-color LED light when its turned. From there, the possibilities are endless. Over the next few days we hope to continue becoming acquainted with the uses of the Arduino and its coexistence with Xively (a website that wirelessly takes readings from devices and displays them on the computer). This is the stuff I could really get into, computers, gadgets, wires, coding, all that jazz. 

     On the flip side, we had three important meetings today, the first being with Joe Kornafel from Sodexo and dining services. After our 12:30 lunch break, we reconvened at Brodhead's dining hall to speak to Joe (the ice cream freezer looked so appealing). He basically was on board with helping us, offering to fill buckets we provide him with the kitchen's pre-consumer food waste. He said we may only get one bucket a day, but hey, it's a start. We met with Delicia after, who is the most amazing woman I've almost ever met. Delicia is the Sustainability Coordinator (officer?) for all of Lehigh. She got us pretty psyched to be working on this project, and is going to help us set up a meeting with some important people to slingshot our project into orbit. We are hoping that our project gains some credibility, and that Lehigh is going to want to take on our project. I want to earn it, not have it given to us just because we are a Mountain Top Project and dug around some dirt and garbage for eight weeks. I want to hand them a solid project worth taking. 

Our last meeting was at the Community Garden with Dr. Holland and a man named Jason Slipp. Jason was the man, he knew his farming and his composting, and was pleased to hear about our project. So far I'm finding our project is getting a lot of positive feedback. I hope we can deliver for these people, and for ourselves. 

We romped around the garden for a while (note to self, wear durable shoes willing to get dirty from now on), checking out old compost piles and the shed full of tools. SO many tools. Pitch forks for us to turn our piles with. We are going to hopefully be setting up windrows in the far back corner of the garden specifically section off for composting projects. Then we are going to establish a turning schedule and manually do it ourselves, really getting nitty gritty with it. Once we have successfully made some compost, and can show people that this project is worth investing in, we are trying to get Brickman or another company in on tractors to turn our piles for us. Really bring it to the Institutional level, that's our goal. After standing around a year old unfinished compost pile for a few minutes talking, Jason said my favorite quote of the day.

"Oh, and before you leave, check yourself for ticks."

 Just what I wanted to hear...

Well, that's about it for today.

Day 7

First official day in Mountain Top C building!!! The hype is real. It looks like an old airplane hanger, with ceiling fans straight out of the hovercraft in The Avengers movie. (no jokes, where's iron man?? calling Robert Downy Jr). Despite how awesome they look, they blow an annoyingly cold breeze onto all of the helpless victims below. Note to Self: dress for the tundra. The hanger is set up with 29 different sectioned off work stations, using rolling white boards as dividers. Strips of outlets are provided, along with four chairs and a table for each. It looks moderately like a classroom environment, that is, if classrooms were in giant loading bays for spaceships and other aircrafts. They added metal mesh over the railings of the "observation deck" I'm assuming so we don't jump off or fall through? I couldn't decide. They built a "pantry" which includes two tables and chairs, and a vending machine with actual food in it, like.. Fage yogurt. There is an outside seating area on a cement patio with a few tables surrounded by chairs, which I sought refuge from the cold today several times. They are in the midst of building two workshops, one being a woodshop, and a room full of fish tanks for the aquaponics project. Cannot wait to make friends with them. The building is not quite finished, but it's come along way from a week ago.

 Our day began with our daily deliverables in Alec's tiny handwriting that we've all grown to love. To properly "move in" we decided Alec's enormous speakers would be a logical addition. We made ourselves comfortable at a section with Wheely-chairs (the best kind of chairs) and got to work. Lots of sticky notes and white board writing, per usual. Our song choice of the day was 8 days a week by the Beatles.

Now that all formal business is taken care of, I can begin to talk to you about sciencey stuff. We took the initiative to create a collaborative list of the Steps to Composting. Since we realized we would soon be composting for realsies, and we need to seem adequately educated on what we're doing. Here's what we came up with..

Steps to Composting:

1.) Prepare the site

     a. flat land

     b. drainage ditches

2.) Making the Pile 

     a. start with bulking agents (woodchips/hay)

     b. layer food waste/dirt/bulking agents

3.) Manage the Pile

     a. keep track of necessary data

     b. add food waste and bulking agents as needed

     c. turning the pile

     d. covering with dirt and a tarp

4.) Curing and Starting a New Pile

That's a streamlined but expandable list that seems moderately appropriate for beginners to start composting. Crossing our fingers that we know what we're doing when the time comes, but a piece of me knows that we'll be just winging it out there by ourselves. Advisors are great guidelines, but that's just it, they are guiding us and nothing more. We are coming up with the "assignment" on our own. It's our project. It's our baby, and there are no limitations to where it can go besides ourselves. We are our own limits. Which is sweet and scary at the same time. "Blessing and a curse" Alec had said to a reporter today. Seeing as we were one of 3 groups out of the 29 total that actually showed up today, and we had a week of project under our belt, the journalists were on us like white on rice. They all wanted pictures of our boards and they stood there, four in a row, all taking down the same notes as we spoke about our project. One guy said he worked for national media, like Philadelphia and New York.

After our composting steps lists, we talked a bit about Leachate, which is compost run-off water that mixes with drinking water sources making them unhealthy for the users. We came up with possible ways to avoid leachate, keeping track of them and deciding which ones we were going to implement for our Alpha Test Phase.

Today Alec also proposed something that really got our gears going. He suggested we create some sort of robotic sensor system to measure temperature, soil moisture and oxygen levels. Upon further research, we saw that this could be done using an Arduino (which I was completely unfamiliar with at first). It's gonna take a lot more research and experimenting and testing, but I think it adds a whole other aspect to our project and I'm looking forward to where it takes us.

We visited Bill Best, our favorite man to bother during the week, and bounced some ideas off of him. He likes our work, and thinks our "ideas" have finally become a "project". According to his definition anyway. That man has never once told me I couldn't do something. He's given me helpful suggestions on where to take something that wasn't fully developed, but he has never told me No. He truly believes in people, and well, ideas. Which makes sense, because he's our IDEAS advisor/dean.

We split for lunch and independent research, learning as much as we could stand about Arduinos and robotic sensors. Meeting up again at 3:30, shared our findings, made some plans for tomorrow, and called it a day. I also learned that Hot and Spicy Cheez-Its are the way to be. Always. Well, Looking forward to actually composting soon, and toying with some Arduinos. For now, that's about it.

Day 6

Today's Daily Deliverables :

--Identify Research Topics
--Steps for Alpha Testing
     - call Brickman
     - Identifiy people (who do we need to talk about what)

Monday started off a bit delayed due to Graduation (basically I wanted to watch it but it conflicted with our time slot). Once we got rolling, we did all of our final preparations before we moved into MountainTop C. Alec, Ben and I drove up to tour the building and see how they were coming along. They had since finished almost everything, including creating 29 work spaces with rolling white boards and cork boards, along with tables and chairs and outlets. Ed, the construction supervisor was there and we had a quality chat with him again before heading back down to STEPS. I'm sure gonna miss our glass box, but it's time to move on to bigger and better things.

The song of the day is Last Dance for Mary Jane by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, just because Alec was in a mood. One of my personal favorite songs. It set a wonderful mood for the rest of the working day. We make ourselves a list of questions we wanted to get answered, as well as tried to map out what the rest of our week is going to look like. Tuesday bright and early, meaning 9am, we will be claiming our space up at Mountain Top. We're all excited and curious to see what the working environment is going to be now that we are in the same building as the 28 other groups. Here's to a good second week and beyond.

Home-Research Topics for Monday Night:
--After having done some research, create your own list of composting steps to follow
--Combine steps Tuesday morning with group's
--Have a final set list of steps so when we start composting, we know what we are doing

Day Four

FIELD TRIPP!!!!!!!!!!!

I picked the group up in my brown 2002 jeep at 8:30 this morning at the usual spot, and we headed out route 22 to Easton. Lafayette College actually is really pretty, despite how much I'm obligated to hate it by being a Lehigh Student. They're also half our size, which makes them clearly sub-par. After getting slightly lost, we made it to room 318 in the AEC (some engineering center). We met with Arthur Kney, the Department head of the Civil and Environmental Department at Lafayette. He was a nice guy, had a daughter named Elise, and drank large Dunkin Donuts coffees. He seemed very knowledgeable and willing to answer any questions we could fire at him about composting. As we left his office to go to the actual composting site, I caught a piece of paper taped to his door with a quote on it that I was rather amused by.

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

-Albert Einstein

Touche, Einstein. We hopped into Art's neat blue Nissan truck, with hats and sweatshirts askew in the back seat from Maine and other such places. The composting site was only a short drive away, and from there we actually got to examine their Earth Bins and the contents inside. And to my pleasant surprise, it didn't smell nearly half as bad as I thought it was going to. And the weather today was 70 and muggy. So again, let me emphasize my pleasant surprise. Just as we researched, there were two Bins underneath a soundly built Solar Panel structure. After a moderately thorough round of questioning from us, we got what we needed and bid Art adieu. See ya later Lafayette, although sooner rather than later because we are supposed to meet with the woman in charge of their garden, Sarah. 

Yep. that's compost. mmmmmmm...

sweet getup ya got there Laf

Bin

Art had mentioned that the Lafayette garden was a few miles away, and that's where their compost gets put to use. He told us we could go there with Sarah. Being the adventurers that we are, we took the initiative to google it and go investigate for ourselves. Dang. This garden puts ours to shame. I guess that's what you can expect from a small liberal arts college; people who care about gardening. We saw a family far into the garden planting and hoeing, so we ventured over to ask them some questions. This was their third year at the garden, the bunnies ate the leaves off their snap-peas, and their kale and spinach was planted four weeks ago and still has barely grown. fascinating.. We explored to our earthy hearts' desires, and with wet, dandelion seed covered feet, shoes, and pants, we finally headed out. My shoes are still wet and it's been two and a half hours. 

Scaring the daylights out of my group by accelerating instead of decelerating towards a red light, we eventually made our way home safely. The song of the day is Ants Marching by Dave Matthews Band. One, because I love Dave Matthews Band and it was my day to pick, and two, it seemed reasonable considering all the insects and buggies and things we encountered today. If I could stay indoors for the majority of my days, I probably would. I'm a beach person, not so much farms. It's funny because only one person on our team is actually studying Environmental Engineering. Ben and I are both computer science, and Alec is Energy Engineering and Sustainable Development. Tori on the other hand is Environmental Engineering. She actually just wants to study Soil. Like dirt. Because it goes hand in hand with Archeology. But literally, soil.

After our field trip we spent a couple hours in our glass case, writing on windows and sharing with each other the prior night's research we gathered. We came on up with a game plan for the coming days, tomorrow's including coming in at 10 and leaving at 1 to get lunch together at the Goose. I am dreaming about these sandwiches. The weekend should be for a break, but we'll probably end up doing research anyway. We meet with Professor Best on Monday to get a good launch into the week. He's so inspiring. Future field trips are absolutely in order. Delaware Valley College is next, followed by Dickinson College. We are trying to make this project as hands on as we can, because I cannot sit around for the next 7 weeks. AND. MONDAY. we get to go to Mountaintop C to test our new digs. Fingers crossed they actually finish the construction. 

For now, that's a wrap I suppose. 

Day 3

Daily Deliverables:
--Assign research topics
--plan "Alpha Test Phase"
--prepare for field trip

Day three started off with Munchkins courtesy of Tori. Alec couldn't decipher which ones were chocolate. Come on, Alec. We put our heads together and decided it was a good idea to actually do some composting this summer. Sitting in classroom is getting tiring and it's only been three days. I can't do eight weeks of it. Luckily, next week we get to go up and play in Mountaintop C! So pumped. They even have a kitchen (pantry) for us. Once we cooked up a plan for a pre-phase-I (calling it Alpha Test Phase) we pretty much called it a day, considering our big field trip tomorrow. We are leaving at 8:30 for Lafayette college to meet with their head compost guy and scope out their set-up. We are hoping to learn more about on-campus composting so we can start our test phase.

For individual work, we split up the topics needed to be handled. We need to know the regulations that apply to an on-campus compost site, as well as the data that we need to collect and how to go about collecting it. We need to come up with a management plan for the summer and how it's going to get run, as well as email a bunch of people in order to get approval and make sure we can use the food waste from Brodhead dining hall. After that work was allotted evenly among the four of us, we went our separate ways, only to meet up again tomorrow morning.

Lots of pictures and information to come after tomorrow!

Day 2

Daily Deliverables:
-- Decide who gets to research what
-- Learn more about in-vessel vs. out-of-vessel Composting
-- Talk to Delicia Nahman
-- Field trip to Community Garden this afternoon

The feel of the morning was set by the song "Send Me on My Way". This song is the perfect road trip/adventure starting song. Much brain storming occurred today. Writing on the glass windows with markers to feel extra smart. We investigated composting facilities at other schools, such as Cornell, Lafayette, Delaware Valley College, and University of Colorado at Boulder. Given the daunting task of determining what type of composting system Lehigh should take on, we wanted to see how other schools around the country were doing it.

We gained access to a 65 page presentation of the University of Michigan and how their composting system was broken down. (get it? broken down? composting? jokes). They had this really neat idea of splitting the implementation up into Phases. So in our case, Phase I would be taking pre and post consumer food waste from just the Rathbone Dining Hall (our biggest standalone dining hall). Pre-Consumer waste consists of anything before it gets to the student. All the waste from prepping vegetables and such. Waste is considered Post-Consumer as soon as it is on a plate. Employees at Rathbone are hired by Sodexo and take care of all post-c waste. Students wouldn't even notice that their food was being composted if we did implement Phase I. We believe that is a good thing, because it is difficult to get people to change their habits (ie. putting food into compost bins instead of regular trash).

Phase II would be including the other dining hall Cort (pre  and post consumer waste) as well as Upper Cort (strictly pre consumer) and the Brodhead House Dining Hall. The concept is to start off with a place the has a constant flow of food, i.e. the low fruit on the tree. Easy to pick. Then as the phases progress, we tackle food waste from less consistent sources, such as libraries, classrooms, residence halls, and eventually every building on campus. This is a very long term and lofty goal, but hopefully one not out of our reach within the next 5 to 10 years.  Eventually we would like to incorporate the outer community of Southern Bethlehem, such as Broughal Middle School and local eateries.

We then backtracked our thinking. Drawing a big list of pro's and cons, we tried to determine the difference between Business As Usual (BAU) and Phase I. What would change from right this minute if we implemented Phase I? Things such as the dehydrator at Rathbone would be gone (which would make it slightly less smelly when you're walking passed the back of Rathbone which we all know is Hell on Earth), as well is replacing Cougles with Brickman. Cougles currently takes our waste from Lehigh to Four Springs Farm in Kutztown, PA (30 miles away). Brickman would just take it to Mountain Top campus (< 2 miles) to our own composting facility. Sounds ideal right? But the thing is, we then need someone to manage this facility. Whether it is a graduate student, a Sustainable Energy intern, or someone from an outside source such as Brickman, they need to know what they're doing. Or at least be passionate about it. After we create a facility with someone to manage it, there is still a matter of manual labor, to actually run it. Then, once it is up and running, we need to apply all of the regulations laid down by the EPA to make sure we can use the compost in a garden or what have you. In order to figure out if we are meeting regulations, we need to gather data of all the compost we make. This data includes aeration, moisture, temperature, and particle size. OH, and somewhere in there, we need all of the proper permits from the state of Pennsylvania.

As you can see, there are approximately one billion factors we have to take into consideration for this project. Let's delve a little bit into the difference between in-vessel and out-of-vessel composting. Not to bore you too much, but I just want to point out some enormous problems that we are going to face.

In-vessel composting is self contained, self-running, and self-monitoring (for the most part). They are expensive, small, and hard to expand. Lafayette College has two Earth Bins covered by solar panels to power them as well as to keep them covered, and they process up to 200 lbs of food waste per day. Delaware Valley College has out-of-vessel composting. They use 3 acres of land covered with Windrows that are turned daily. A windrow I learned is basically a huge pile of decomposing food. They are long and brown, and pretty much look like Hostess Ho Hos. A tractor with a cool turning mechanism (if you can afford one) turns the windrows in order to maintain temperature, aeration, etc. The hottest temperatures come from the center of the windrow, so it gets all mixed up to cool it down.

Super interesting, I know, but think about this. What happens to Del Val's outdoor Ho Hos in the winter? Riddle me that. How do two little Earth Bins maintain all of the food waste for Lafayette's entire campus? All good questions. We decided that field trips are in order.

Speaking of field trips, we decided to go to the Community Gardens after lunch today. Possibly up to Mountain Top Building C again too, just for fun. The first one we went to is the actual Lehigh Community Garden. Although it didn't look anyone had been there in months. It was mainly growing Dandelions. We saw some old piles of compost (possible windrows?). After a few minutes of perusing around there wasn't a lot to see, so we took off for the other site Lehigh could set up a composting facility. It was next to the highway, full of abandoned machinery and tons of wood. We saw a Brickman truck pull in as we were leaving, and we almost went to stalk them and interview them, but decided against it. Next stop, community garden number two. This one was a LOT cleaner and more organized and smaller than the first. We turned on the hose and even gave some plants a little sprinkle. Basically the second half of today was spent on reconnaissance, seeing what campus had to offer to our project. As they say, Location, Location, Location.

Team regroup at STEPS 430, our glass case of emotions, to split up research work. Half and half, in-vessel and out-of-vessel. aaaaaaaaand Break!

brown waste-- aka sticks and trees

sea of dandelions 

label on the water bin at the garden..

compost, with "decomposable plates and utensils"...yeah okay 

dead animal skull?

"it's broken. let's just leave it here"

clearly we know what we're doing. 

it was not moving.