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.