Monday, October 28, 2013

Building and flying an incredibly tiny quadrotor drone



At the National Science Foundation grant where I work, EnLiST, we've been tinkering with various different drone platforms which could be easily deployed in classrooms for valuable STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) lessons.

Although we're focused on STEM education, it's not hard to see how some of these drones can be used in a variety of other fields. The quadrotors we develop one day could be deployed for research in environmental science, geology, city planning, and even "evidence-based" journalism.

Drones are useful like that. At the end of they day, they're simply a means of getting a sensor from one place to another. What you use that sensor for, is entirely up to the teacher, scientist, or journalist.

We needed a drone that was small enough to fly in a classroom, easy enough for children to fly (not saying much as kids tend to pilot drones with relative ease), and hackable enough that we could mold it to fit our science curriculum.




Enter the Crazyflie nano, a tiny, open-source drone developed by Swedish hackers at Bitcraze.se. At 19 grams, and measuring 9 cm from motor to motor, it's one of the smallest quadrotor drones on the market today.

Friday, October 18, 2013

Measure air pollution in your home or backyard with a DustDuino


This week, the World Health Organization (WHO) took a major step by announcing that air pollution is carcinogenic to humans.

WHO also announced they are considering particulate matter, a major component of indoor and outdoor air pollution, as carcinogenic to humans as well.


The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a special unit inside WHO tasked with promoting international collaborations on cancer research, reached that conclusion after reviewing more than 1000 scientific papers on the carcinogenicity of air pollutants.

Air pollution and particulate matter will be included in IARC's Monograph, which is an encyclopedia of known carcinogens. Particulate matter will be classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, along with tobacco smoke and asbestos.

In an IARC press release [1], the Deputy Head of the Monographs Programme, Dr. Dana Loomis, said that the group's goal was to "evaluate the air everyone breathes rather than focus on specific air pollutants."

"The results from the reviewed studies point in the same direction: the risk of developing lung cancer is significantly increased in people exposed to air pollution," he said.

This finding elevates the urgency to clean up the air, both outdoors and indoors. But how does one find out the condition of the air in the first place? How healthy is your air?