Synopses & Reviews
Environmental monitoring projects have taken off with ubiquitous smartphones and low-cost, amateur-friendly microprocessors like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. This book explores both the gear and the human side of the sensing revolution. Youll learn how networks of people can conceive and build sensor systems, develop best practices for collecting, analyzing, and drawing information from the data, and then use the results to affect real-world issues.
In the process, youll explore several issues that many hobbyists, makers, artists, journalists, and activists encounter when building a sensor network, such as: how do you power them? What is "good" versus "bad" data, and how do you tell them apart? How do you collect your data: over the air or by hand from each device? And how do you analyze your data effectively and make it accessible to others?
- Learn how sensor network design solutions relate to the problem being solved
- Get case studies on significant sensor network projects—how they work and what theyve revealed
- Find answers to tricky questions in scaling a sensor network, such as power supply and data transmission
- Discover how to avert GIGO in data analysis: Garbage in, garbage out
- Learn about sensor networks and the democratization of data
About the Author
Emily Gertz is a correspondent for OnEarth Magazine. She has been covering DIY environmental monitoring since 2004, when she interviewed engineer-artist Natalie Jeremijenko for Worldchanging.com. Her latest, on citizen radiation monitoring in Japan, was published by OnEarth Magazine in April 2011. She has been hands-on with internet technologies since 1994 as a web producer, community host, and content strategist. Her articles have appeared in Grist, Dwell, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, and more.
Patrick Di Justo is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he writes the magazine's monthly What's Inside column, and the author of The Science of Battlestar Galactica (Wiley, October 2010). His work has appeared in Dwell, Scientific American, Popular Science, The New York Times, and more. He has worked as a robot programmer for the Federal Reserve, and knows C, C++, Java, and Processing. He bought his first Arduino in 2007.