COCATB
         
    Home | Overview | Projects | Technologies | Research | Resources | Team | Contact
       
   

Within the Neighborhood Networks project we use existing technologies and also develop custom platforms for community-based robotics and sensing.

Canary Resources
Canary Board Diagrams (pdf) Ayca Akin

Canary Housing Design (Flickr) Dan Letson

  Because we want to facilitate the broad use and exploration of robotics and sensing the technologies we use are a important aspect of the project. Most professional and academic platforms for robotics and sensing are expensive and difficult to use. Therefore, we developed our own platform, called The Canary, as a low-cost and accessible alternative.

The Canary
The Canary is a handheld device for monitoring a suite of environmental factors including general air quality, humidity, temperature, and sound and light levels. It is designed with the goal of bringing sensing technologies to a broader audience and, in the process, fostering technological fluency and new understanding of the environment.

In addition to sensing capabilities, the Canary has motor parts, a piezo buzzer, and a full-color LED-all of which respond to sensor values. Using the Canary, people can rapidly produce tangible interfaces, kinetic sculptures, and interactive spaces that are coupled to the environment.

The Canary device is based on the versatile Atmel Atmega168 programmable microcontroller, a popular IC for low-cost embedded applications. The Atmega168 has eight analog inputs used for reading environmental sensors, a UART for serial communication with an external computer and for displaying text to an LCD, and about a dozen general purpose digital I/O pins that are programmed for controlling the servos, LED, buttons, and buzzer. The Canary uses a number of different circuits that sense light, temperature, ambient noise, air pollution, humidity, and pressure. The light and temperature sensors are based on simple (and cheap) components which vary resistance based on an environmental stimulus. The Canary obtains values for humidity and pressure by using off-the-shelf integrated circuits that output a voltage value which linearly maps to the stimulus. The ambient sound level is found by combining a microphone, a simple one-transistor amplifier, and a software filter running on the Canary's firmware. Finally, air pollution is determined using the Dart Sensors Air Quality Sensor; this sensor is based on fuel cell technology which outputs a small current based on the presence of certain air pollutants. A current to voltage amplifier converts the current into an output voltage which can be read by the Atmega168.

Canary Resources
Canary Board Diagrams (pdf) Ayca Akin
Canary Housing Design (Flickr) Dan Letson