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Tag: open source

Arduino Project Log: Building the Sea Leveler Part 1 – Hardware

Posted on April 13, 2013April 13, 2013 By Andrew Thaler
The Open CTD Project

headshot-thalerSMALL

The Sea Leveler.
The Sea Leveler.

Two weeks ago, I announced my latest Hacking the Ocean project, an open-source, Arduino-powered water level meter that monitors the frequency of tweets containing the hashtag #sealevelrise. Since launch, the Sea Leveler has had some bugs and received some good press.  Now that I’ve had some time to monitor its performance and work the bugs out of its code, it is finally time for the promised “how to build the Sea Leveler” post.

This project was much more involved than my Arduino build and significantly more rewarding. The Sea Leveler was a challenge on multiple fronts, from learning to make the Arduino talk to twitter to physically modifying the water level meter. As I noted in my first project log, I have very little programming experience, and the major goal of this build was to level up my C++ skills. I’m very happy with the results, both technical and aesthetic.

For simplicity, I’m going to break this into two posts, one for hardware and one for software.

Read More “Arduino Project Log: Building the Sea Leveler Part 1 – Hardware” »

Meet Sea Leveler: the open source water level gauge that wants you to talk about #sealevelrise

Posted on March 26, 2013March 14, 2022 By Andrew Thaler 2 Comments on Meet Sea Leveler: the open source water level gauge that wants you to talk about #sealevelrise
Science

headshot-thalerSMALL

The Sea Leveler, an open source water level gauge that measures activity on twitter.
The Sea Leveler, an open source, arduino-powered, water level gauge that measures activity on twitter.

Two weeks ago, a machine was left on the “free” table at my lab that surprised me–a beautiful stainless steel mechanical water level gauge, on of those old ones with a flywheel in the back that drives the mechanism. Seeing this made me realize that there must be thousands of old scientific devices rusting away in laboratories across the country, obsolete but too well-build to just be thrown out. Then, I thought, there must be some way to take these old tools, some of them elegant, hand crafted works of industrial art, and give them a second life. For Science Online Oceans, I proposed a section on “Hacking the Ocean” developing low-cost, DIY instrumentation to make oceanography accessible to a broader community, but could that work the other way? Can we harness that same maker mentality to take abandoned scientific instrumentation and turn them into tools for education and outreach, or create art through instrumentation?

So I built the Sea Leveler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI6p5QxTDEU

Read More “Meet Sea Leveler: the open source water level gauge that wants you to talk about #sealevelrise” »

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