Josh On Design

As regular readers know I have recently jumped into Arduino and hardware hacking full-time. One of the things which fascinates me is the idea of monitoring our environment. I mean not only the global environment but also our own local spaces. Sensors and computation are incredibly cheap. Network access is almost ubiquitous. This means we can easily monitor our world and learn interesting things by analyzing simple data points over time.

Being an engineer I started by picking out some books to read. First up is an amazingly thin but info-packed tome from Maker Press: Environmental Monitoring with Arduino: Building Simple Devices to Collect Data About the World Around Us by Emily Gertz and Patrick Di Justo. As the name would suggest, it is exactly the book I was looking for.

Before I continue I must warn you, reading this book will make you spend a lot of money. You will find yourself spending hours checking out cool sensors and outputs on websites like Adafruit, SparkFun, and Emartee. Tracking your environment with simple sensors is simply too intriguing. I apologize in advance for the new habit you will form.

Though short (81 pages by my count), Environmental Monitoring with Arduino contains a lot of information. It starts with a chapter called "The World's Shortest Electronics Primer" introducing Arduino, basic electronics, and then runs through an LED blinking tutorial. From here you jump straight into your first sensing application: a noise monitor with an LED bar graph.

The book is organized in mostly alternating chapters. Each chapter either introduces a new piece of hardware or a project using that hardware. The chapters cover how to measure electromagnetic interference, water purity, humidity / temperature / dew point, and finally atomic radiation as used by individuals in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

The components required to build most of the projects in the book are surprisingly cheap. For example, Emartee's mini sound sensor, a tiny board containing a microphone and the support circuitry, is only seven dollars.

The only really pricey component is the Geiger counter from Goldmine that costs $137. Of course it uses a special beta and gamma ray sensitive mueller tube from Russia so it's actually fairly cheap. Most components are under $10.

While I love the book there are a few things that could be improved. Each chapter contains a few paragraphs explaining what we are measuring and how it works (water conductivity was especially interesting), but I'd like to learn more about the science behind each effect. This probably isn't possible in a book of this size, so links to external websites would be greatly appreciated.

I'd also like an appendix with links to learn more about Arduino and environmental sensing, as well as a list of sites to buy cheap components that are easy to work with.

Finally, there is no information on the authors. Most books include a short bio or an introduction by the authors to explain who they are and why you should listen to them. This book contains no biographical information at all beyond the authors' names.

Go - No Go?

A definite go.

If you are new to environmental monitoring this book is a great place to start, even if you know nothing about electronics and Arduino. And for the price ($7.99 for the print copy and half that for ebook) it's a steal. You can get it on:

• Amazon in print
• Amazon as Kindle book
• O'Reilly print or ebook