Team:TU-Munich/Results/Implementation

One advantage of a moss filter is that it works quite autonomic. Once the moss is installed it filters until it's "saturated", assumed that the environmental parameters fit and a proper living space is provided. The main goal of our measurenment device is to monitor these environmental parameters in real time. Since the filter's autonomy has to be obtained and the costs should be kept as low as possible, the usage of ordinary lab measurenment tools is limited. Looking one step ahead it's suggesting to use the moss for cleaning waters like ponds or streams. Places that are not continuously supervised by humans. So the aim was to use a low cost and low energy solution, that maintain the filters autonomy.

This is where Arduino comes into play. Arduino is a platform that is based on one microcontroller wich is attached to a circuit board. Its convenient handling and easy programming, the lots of available hardware and the great community support make it one of the most popular prototyping platforms these days, espacially for multidisciplinary applications. Among its many fans it already enjoys cult status. We first used the Arduino Uno. It is the most commonly used board and the first revision was released in September 2010. Designed for beginners, it gave us an easy start into the handling, since no one of us had any experience working with microcontrollers. ABBILDUNG_UNO Most libraries already worked out of the box and all shields and sensors we ordered came with an example code. But the Arduino Uno came to it's limits, when we tried to get a display, wifi and several sensors working.

Therefore we ordered the Arduino Due, wich is the most powerful Arduino board. It has 16 times more flash memory (code storage) than the Arduino Uno and its clock runs 5 times faster. Instead of 2KB SRAM there are 96KB. At least there are a lot more free pins that can be used for sensors etc, and still its costs don't exceed 50€€ (~60$).

Gruppenfoto

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6327079 Edens et al., 1984

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6327079 Edens et al., 1984 Edens, L., Bom, I., Ledeboer, A. M., Maat, J., Toonen, M. Y., Visser, C., and Verrips, C. T. (1984). Synthesis and processing of the plant protein thaumatin in yeast. Cell, 37(2):629–33.