Junior Research Project

OVERVIEW

For my Junior year in the Engineering strand at the Governor’s School for Science & Technology, my research project was a continuation of an award-winning science fair project I did in 8th grade. The 8th-grade project involved using Arduino to create an environmental monitoring device that connected to the cloud using the Internet of Things and could remotely check on the temperature and humidity of the tanks in my middle school’s marine science lab. (INSERT PICTURE OF DEVICE). After winning at the city science fair with this device, one of the judges who worked at a local landfill reached out to me. We started a project to modify the device in order to monitor the temperature of mulch piles.

The current system involved someone manually going around to all of the piles, one by one, sticking a 5-foot pole with a thermometer into each of them, and then writing down the temperature. My solution would involve my device being strapped to the end of a piece of PVC pipe that remains in the pile, with a temperature probe threaded through the tube.

The temperature would then be recorded every few minutes and stored in an Excel chart on an SD card that can simply be collected in the morning and placed back again later. The ultimate goal, however, involved getting WiFi to the landfill so that this could all be done through the Internet and the real-time temperatures of all the piles could be checked from anywhere, even a phone!