My aim for this workshop (19-9-09) was to put the three sensors together but we also had a have a meeting with AnnaMariaCornelia concerning the design. The rest was kind enough to let me meet first. I showed the various designs I did with the safety vest as basis. The vest was present from the start of this project because of it’s connection with safety and the clean way it signals a simple message. So Anna suggested I stick to those basics instead of just decorating the vest. She’s absolutely right of course. I should just use the esthetics and functionally of the vest to inform about air quality. Research has shown that the amount and broadness of the reflective stripes indicate higher safety. So I can vary the width of the strips to indicate more or less pollution, resulting in more or less visibility. I’ll use strips of conductive fabric to heat the paint. That should give a nice, clean result.
My research also showed that there are some very functional coats with different pockets. I want to use them in my design to store and build in the boards, buttons, phone and power supply.
The building of the board with sensors went pretty smoothly. That’s no surprise with an expert like Paul standing by my side. So now I’ve got a great little board with all the sensors powered at their own voltage. We also build in a switch to turn all the sensors on and off at the same time to increase their lifetime. We did discover that the ozone sensor is influenced by humidity. So I ordered a humidity sensor yesterday so I can at least measure it. How to interpret the data is a completely different question, the next problem to tackle.
