Cornell University Professor Nina Bassuk Becomes Involved

Earlier this week I contacted some of the contributors to the Site Assessment for Gardeners Workbook. This is one of the many valuable resources offered by Cornell University that has been very useful to our project. It outlines exactly what a gardener would need to discern about their gardening site in order to properly assess which plants to grow there. In our case, it has shown us exactly what variables our device will need to measure. As we are working on automating modifications to the manual site tests described in the Site Assessment for Gardeners Workbook, we thought it would be a good idea to make sure our modifications were accurate replications of the original tests, and who better to ask than the authors themselves. Cornell University Professor Nina Bassuk has generously offered to evaluate our modifications and provide suggestions on how to make them more accurate or appropriate to our project. We greatly appreciate Professor Bassuk's support, and cannot wait to work with her!

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More Help from Vernier

One revolutionary component of the Garden Consultant is the physical device that will acquire data from the soil. Unfortunately, this means we need a physical device to acquire data. In our research, we have found several possibilities for DAQs (Data AcQuisition devices).

Mr. Tom White generously donated a Vernier SensorDAQ to help us along. After hearing about our project, Mr. David Vernier donated several sensors including a soil moisture sensor and a temperature probe. These senors were designed for the SensorDAQ and are automatically detected and set up for easy use.

However, our project requires sensors that Vernier doesn't offer. I built a sunlight sensor using a photo-resistor, but couldn't connect it to our SensorDAQ because we were lacking the "screw terminal connector". After a quick email to Mr. Vernier, the connector was in the mail and the project was able to continue.

At this stage in the project, we are realizing that our device will not be composed of simple, compatible pieces of hardware. In order to create a truly innovative device, we will need both creativity in our group and support from our sponsors. Thank you, Mr. Vernier, for your generosity and quick response.

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Eco-Friendly Thinking from Saratoga Springs

A few days ago Leigh Estabrooks and other people from Lemelson-MIT asked all of the 2007-2008 InvenTeams to answer a few questions regarding our views on the environment and the future of engineering. A few other team members and I had a brief chat about the questions proposed and submitted our response to the blog. With the current state of the environment and the changes that we are seeing in the environment world-wide it is important that we as future engineers consider the effects we have on the environment and work to make the world a better place. Here is what we had to say.

- Elliott

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Server Hosting by Spa.Net

The Saratoga Springs HS InvenTeam would like to thank local internet provider Spa.Net for hosting the server we are using (which was donated by Bruce Hodge). After the recent donation we had to find a service provider to host the server. Thanks to generosity of Spa.Net we will have our server and the Garden Consultant up and running in no time.

Thank you so much for your help and support and we look forward to showing you the cool work we are doing in the near future. Our work would not be possible without you.

Thanks -
Elliott Poppel & The SSHS InvenTeam

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Programming Progress & The Great Inventor

The image on the left is from an article in Times Union "People who make a difference" That's Bruce all right!!! He was a feature recipient receiving this dignified distinction for his innovative work with his targeting systems as well as holding several patents. He has helped immensely giving of his time and bringing a vast knowledge and passion for creativity.

Bruce Hodge met with us again this last Monday. He taught us to use a program called NoteTab. This program gives us the ability of writing and testing HTML, CSS, and Perl scripts. This program will make it easier for creating our website for our project. He also worked with Jeff to better understand how MySQL works. Jeff has now started to create our database of plants.

We have been making some real visible progress with the Garden Consultant and having a genius like Bruce Hodge only a phone call away to answer our programming questions this project could not be going any better.

Bruce, thanks so much for your time and we can't wait to have you in class again.

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Central Desktop: Collaboration at its Best!

For the past month or so the Saratoga Springs HS InvenTeam has been making use of a web-based collaboration, communication, and file-sharing utility called Central Desktop. I found this program when my G-Mail account happened to have a news feed about it across the top of my inbox. We started using it immediately as an easier and more organized way of sharing files and since then we have begun taking advantage of many of its other features, especially now that we have been donated a full access Corporate Central Desktop Account where we can now host web-meetings, manage tasks, send out automatic reminders, and store all our documents among other things. This is an amazing tool and I can not express how awesome it is to have all the great tools that Central Desktop offers at our InvenTeams disposal.

A special thank you to Isaac Garcia, CEO and Co-Founder of Central Desktop, for donating to us this account and enabling us to use his awesome program. Central Desktop is by far the coolest tool the web has to offer and it has become the cornerstone of our InvenTeam. I can not thank Mr. Garcia and all of you at Central Desktop enough for you help and your work. Not only is this a huge asset to our work now, but I personally will be using Central Desktop in college and in my professional life.

Thanks for all your help -
Elliott

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