Science Hack Day 2020 began as has become tradition, with tiny food. Excellent.



Tiny food
Photo by [personal profile] chebe



Then the introductions, the pitches, the socialising, before settling down to work on projects. I came into SciHackDay with three pre-existing projects to work on. But one brand new one, barely 12 hours old, just for SciHackDay.

With COVID-19 doing the rounds there has been a lot in the media about face mask shortages, of border guards checking people for fever, and of people doxing sick children because of the perception that they deserve to know.

So I wanted to make a face mask, that reads your body temperature, and displays it to the world, while you yourself can't see it, because it's not for your benefit.

ExpandDetails )



Wear with cynicism.
Photo by [personal profile] chebe

Someone asked me for this and I realised I'd never posted it. (I had dealt with reading the temp here but not the rest of it.) It's not fully done. The timing and lights and such could still do with some tweaking, but I guess that comes down to personalisation. If you'd like to try this project the physical construction is here, and what follows is my code. If you do give it a go I'd love to see how it turns out!

Expandcode monkey like you )
Science Week has just passed. I wanted to do something Arduino related, and remembered the Breathe Project. I'm not a biology person at all, but loved the idea of investigating breathing. Something we do all the time, most of the time completely unaware, until one day it's very cold, or we're told about breathing exercises as a way to relax. Then we start to get an inkling of how important an act it is. So, shamelessly, I decided to make one of my own.

ExpandWhere I waffle on about construction of a breath sensitive scarf )
The LilyPad range includes a temperature sensor, which is a MCP9700 thermistor type sensor, used for measuring ambient temperatures. It has positive and negative power terminals, and a 's' terminal that you connect to an analogue pin on the LilyPad microcontroller. You set up the code in the same way as for other sensors, and read the value:

ExpandCode )

This does give a seemingly accurate reading (oddly enough I seem to lack any other kind of ambient thermometer), except that it fluctuates quite a bit. But in and around what seems like a decent value. I may have to do some form of averaging to smooth it out.

I was using the new Simple Board, so thought I'd see if there was any difference using the Main Board. There's not, exact same results. So my only other thought is that maybe the USB-power is fluctuating and skewing the results. Of course, I don't have a ready way of reading the values while it's solely on battery power, so I can't check. Interesting though. I wonder if anyone has seen this before?