WinterRoot

Vision Tech for Counter Tech

Together with the Omnicorp Detroit Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange in Detroit, WinterRoot is excited to announce our first ever kickstarter project!  A community technology project to explore and catalog wild plants growing in Detroit’s open spaces.  Full Description follows, or link to Kickstarter and consider backing our project!  We have some great rewards planned for backers, so check it out!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Wildflowers of Detroit ??

One pervasive vision of Detroit is it’s ruins - the monolithic hulks of an industrial era gone by, documented in striking photographs and tales of urban exploration. What has gone missing in this narrative is the other side of the coin. In the open spaces left behind, a monumental resurgence of wild-ness is occurring: plots filled with wildflowers and wildlife. After knowing Detroit’s secret gardens and hidden blooms, we feel this is a story that needs to be told - appreciating this resource is crucial, otherwise it may merely be swept away. Wildflowers of Detroit is a community technology project for cataloging wild plants growing in Detroit, an effort which can enable people’s appreciation of Detroit’s reawakened ecology.  Our technologies collaborative WinterRoot is teaming up with Detroit’s Omnicorp Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange to bring this vision into being.

An iPhone App?

And even more, we hope! We aim to create iPhone, Android, MMS, and email interfaces (all free) for posting geo-tagged photos of wildflowers, and logging their location and salient details for future study and appreciation. When you spot a great specimen or view of one of Detroit’s varied wild plants, you’ll be able to whip out your mobile device, snap a picture, and instantly upload to our website along with automatic longitude and latitude coordinates, adding your find to an interactive map. Sometimes it’s called “citizen science”, we call it community ecology - residents participating in the study of their own area. There is great value to be found in a community understanding it’s own natural process. An incredible phenomenon is afoot in Detroit, lets come together and begin its study!

Want to see it in action??

We already have an alpha version online demonstrating a proof of concept, but we need your help for the full build out. In order for this project to reach it’s full potential, we need to integrate all mobile devices, provide an interactive map showing the locations of the flowers, solve some technical details like caching of photos in areas of bad 3G reception for later upload, allow comments on each photo for identification and discussion, improve the site layout, integrate with social media, acquire substantial hosting, and get going on some advanced features like searching by species or habitat or providing a good interface for crowdsourced identifications.  It’s a big list, and it just keeps getting bigger, but we think that this project can help us transform our impressions of grand old Detroit’s wild spaces. After backing this project, hop over to http://www.wildflowersofdetroit.org/ and start getting involved!!

If overfunded…

We plan to construct a small community herbarium in Detroit, creating a physical record of what grew where and when. Linking this with the website and database will create a dynamic and growing resource for children, students, and researchers interested in the incredible urban flora of Detroit. The ultimate tool for understanding the history and fate of the spaces these organisms occupy. We are still working out the details of where and how this will manifest, so check back here or our facebook page for updates!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

Today we finally mounted this commerically manufactured panel outside. I was able to assemble this mounting strategy with minimal hardware from the store and some scrap lumber. The goal was to make it adjustable, so the front of the panel is mounted with hinges and the back uses threaded rod (see pics below). Unfortunately I didn’t realize that a 70 degree angle would be optimal for winter at this lattitude, so even at its maximum it only goes up to about 55 degrees - some shims will be necessary. In general though, I’m happy with the result - the hinges on the front still ensure it’s adustability. This is a 40 W panel, so even with an average of 4-5 hours of direct sunlight in Michingan winter, I’m hoping to be able to run all the lights (compact flourescent) in our loft off this one panel - we should be able to store over 160W/h a day on average, which is significant. The wires run inside through a hole in the wall to a charge controller, which charges a battery. Thanks again to Hong, who is the actual owner of this panel.

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At this month’s breakcore pancakes we decided to make a start on investigating DIY wind power. We are interested in these plans http://www.scoraigwind.com/pirate%20oldies/Brakedrum%20windmill%201998.pdf because they involve the use of a reused automobile part, something we surely have a LOT of in Detroit. I’m not expecting that we’ll be able to follow these plans exactly, but this is the right idea. Plus Hugh Piggott, the author, describes a lot of principles that are very valuable to understand when doing this sort of thing. He also has some books which look to be really good. We didn’t get particularly far, but advanced our ideas about winding coils. We tried to wind them with the winding machine configured laterally, but now we think that doing the vertical way (pictured) will work better after all. I also didn’t totally understand the shape of the outside wood pieces, but after trying it out I understand how they are supposed to work. I’ll post up pictures of the complete winding machine after the next try.

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It’s winter in Michigan and I’ve been keeping the heater between 60 and 65 degrees. My kombucha culture, on the other hand, prefers a temperature between 70 and 80 degrees, so the culure was growing VERY slowly. I’ve been very interested in energy reuse lately, so I started looking for something I could use to build an incubator without utilizing extra energy. The solution I found is the refridgerator. When the coolant is re-compressed it gives off a lot of heat, this is how it transfers the heat from inside the fridge to the outside.

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I wanted to set up a greywater system to reuse water from our sinks in the toilet tank. At first I just took off the the drain pipe and used the bucket method. This works, but it’s not really the best way to live. I’m not ready for a complex system yet, and storage of grey water is one of the ways to really get yourself in trouble with a system - untreated grey water needs to be used within 24 hours of collection. I decided to simply run a pipe from the sink to the toilet tank. To do so, I had to take the sink off the wall and raise it a foot or so.

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I went to the GLREA (Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association) solar heating seminar this past weekend. I picked up some interesting information at the event, though nothing too revolutionary. Still it was good to get some grounding in where the current mainstream of renewable energy in Michigan is coming at things. I wasn’t really too familiar with everything that’s possible using hot water solar panels, and covering how radiant floor heating and solar air work out definately expands my thinking. It’s pretty important, for instance, to realize that solar water heating is far more efficient that photovoltaic panels.

Since my interest currently is more gear towards DIY applications that can be done at a fraction of the cost of true professional installations, some of this information will take a bit for me to apply. I think one of the most valuable pieces is learning how important it is in water systems to have both a storage tank and a hot water heater tank, which allows for the temperature of the supplied water to be regulated for whatever application it’s being used for. Solar systems seem deceptively simplistic until you start needing to worry about year round site specific usage of excess heat (in the summer) or freezing (in the winter).

I’m prett glad I went. I don’t have the money at the moment to afford the GLREA solar photovoltaic installation apprenticeship ($1000) so I’ll probably just wait until the next introduction seminar and try to pick up the wind energy course if I don’t build a wind turbine before then. Below is an example of the type of system we discussed at length..

I contructed what should be a diy gasifying wood stove, following a paper written at The Biomass Energy Foundation in Goler, CO. The pictures below are from our first attempt at replicating their results. The paper only gives very cursory instructions on how to build and operate such a stove from 2lb coffee cans. The point of this is that if it burns correctly, the stove will be burning wood but have very low emissions, so low in fact that burning wood inside does not require ventilation. Obviously that also means it’s very efficient. Our first attempt worked fairly well. Though we didn’t get a totally blue flame, we did see the smoke disappear, which means the fire was burning cleanly. We did see some blue flames deep in the fire and additionally noted that the fire smelled different than normal.

Getting the fire started, without it’s top (gas wick) on yet.

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My first batch of kombucha is finally done. It took a while for it really get going because it’s been so cold in the space until recently. Even after we got the heat turned on, 60 degrees is still 15-20 degrees below what’s optimum for the kombucha mushroom to grow. That problem was solved however by building an incubator which reuses my refridgerators waste heat, an raises the temperature of the kombucha culture to around 75 degrees. Once that was set up, the culture really picked up and just about a week later I have my first batch. It’s taste is slightly acidic, but all around I think it turned out pretty well. The original scoby has a lot of yeast on the bottom, and the baby is forming nicely, though I think I probably disturbed them quite a bit getting the old tea out and the new tea in.

The solar panel workshop was a success.  We were able to construct a functioning array out of discarded fragments, generating the correct voltage to charge our battery.  Each fragment was wired separately, giving participants the opportunity for some hands on work with solar cells, and then after inserting the wires through holes in a board they were connected in series into two long circuits.  Measuring the wattage output of the panel is a little more difficult and we haven’t gotten a reliable measure yet, but the battery does collect charge and we hypothesize that the panel collects enough energy to at least run a small light.  The construction of this first effort is pretty experimental - we’ve identifier several issues that would be resolved differently on a next version.  Perf board is definately the way to go for wiring the panels through wood, not the drilled out ply used here.  Bits of broken panel also could be wired better by lining up the the large lines and connecting them in lines the same way commercial panels are - obviously since they are broken this will still yeild a jagged, oddly shaped strip, but it doesn’t necessitate as many holds in the board and is generally more manageable.  Of course, for a art/reuse look the random arrange we executed is quite beautiful.   We hope to do another workshop and continue to explode feasibility of this kind of  reuse.  Thanks to all who participated!

This weekend at our breakcore pancakes event on Sunday I’m hoping to try out the idea of a technology workshop. Basically we’ll be soldering together chipped pieces of solar cells (which can be bought on the cheap) to make a complete 20+ volt solar panel. Here are the pieces I bought (about $20 for the whole set, actually not the cheapest deal I could have found.

and the first step in getting them working

even under compact flourescent light, the panel is still generating .05 volts.