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.