Environmental Monitoring with Arduino: Building Simple Devices to Collect Data About the World Around Us

by Emily Gertz, Patrick Di Justo

After the devastating tsunami in 2011, DYIers in Japan built their own devices to detect radiation levels, then posted their finding on the Internet. Right now, thousands of people worldwide are tracking environmental conditions with monitoring devices they’ve built themselves. You can do it too! This inspiring guide shows you how to use Arduino to create gadgets for measuring noise, weather, electromagnetic interference (EMI), water purity, and more. You’ll also learn how to collect and share your own data, and you can experiment by creating your own variations of the gadgets covered in the book. If you’re new to DIY electronics, the first chapter offers a primer on electronic circuits and Arduino programming.

Genres: Ebooks, Engineering, Nonfiction, Technology

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 22, 2011

About the author

I'm a freelance journalist and editor covering the environment, technology, and science. My work has appeared both online and in print, in Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, Whole Living, Dwell, Talking Points Memo, OnEarth Magazine, Grist, and more.

Genres: Environment, science, sustainability, do-it-yourself, technology

Reviews

[Santiago Ortiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The little info it contains is useful and interesting. The book is just too short.

[John Constable · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this when OReilly had a one of their 50% off sales on Ardiono books. Since then I've bought a Rasberry Pi and have been trying to work out which project to do with it, so I wanted to read up on the assorted microelectronics sensor and communications books I'd accrued.

This nicely summed up a number of different projects, all of which you could approach after just reading 'Getting Started with Arduino" also from OReilly. I found, though, after reading it, that I was a bit puzzled. The circuits were a bit simple, which was reassuring for a novice like myself, but there was little about how the authors knew to put them together in this way, so I couldn't do anything other than replicate. Likewise a lot of the value is in things like working out atmospheric pressure, or seiverts, or such like, and while the code was there, and commented, some notes on the approach and some background reading would have been nice. This is especially noticeably in the last project, the Geiger counter, since most of the code is taken up with posting to Pachube rather than the sensor itself, something even the authors admit will be obsolete very quickly (the instructions, hopefully not the site!).

Still, I'll probably build at least a couple of the projects, and its given me the confidence to try, so hurrah!

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good basics if you are just getting started with arduino and have environmental monitoring in mind. One thing to keep in mind is that this is focused on specific gases and environmental stuff, not necessarily things like temperature, humidity and weather data.

You will definitely want to access the online code samples. The book seems to 'waste' a lot of space printing out the full code for the projects, so there is actually quite a bit less content than you'd expect.

[Mark Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good little introduction to the kinds of the weather stations that can be built with the arduino. Good fun.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected more.

[Phil Moyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is ok. This series of publications tend to be a bit short, but this is a decent introduction to Arduino and sensor integration.