Days 18 and 19

Friday we worked on SUSAN a bunch more, following the same general path we did on Thursday. Once the day came to an end, we outline everything we've worked on with SUSAN thus far. It started with every temperature sensor we created. It ranged from the first prototypes we made in PVC pipe and electrical tape, to the most recent 6 foot shielded vs. unshielded wires. After writing out every temperature sensor we've made and analyzing them, a shielded wire with a 10k resistor seems to be our next best bet. We also want to try and incorporate capacitors as well as op-amps to try and better our output. A lack of voltage couple potentially give us skewed results. We are going to try and bring more power on Wednesday when we work on SUSAN again. We wrote out all of the moisture sensors we created and tested (which wasn't that many) and tried to see the best way to continue ahead. We need to do more exploring with those.

Next we planned out the next week, our fifth week of work, and made a list of people we needed to contact. Heading into Monday morning, we had THREE meetings we had to attend. Our first meeting was supposed to be at 11:30am but got pushed back to noon with a reporter for the school website. We had met her once before on the second week of our project, and were happy to talk to her again. She will be at our photo shoot tomorrow that we are having at the garden tomorrow. It's gonna be a blast.

We broke for lunch at 1 after our meeting, and then had a meeting with one of our (sort of) advisors, Delicia. Delicia is the sustainability representative for Lehigh University, so she's pretty official. She's going to help us get our act together and look like adults when we present our project to the head honchos. We presented her with two of our proposed business outlines for who would collect, transport, add, turn, and manage our food waste and compost pile. She gave us helpful insight, and at 2:55 we realized we were late with out next meeting with our actual advisor, Mark Orrs. Low and behold, Mark was an hour late for our meeting (which was supposed to be at 3). So no harm no foul.

After chatting with Mark a bit about the general idea of our project, we headed down to compost. We ran into a friend of mine, Emily Gibbs, who is making her own compost pile for the garden with some other members. We found some sprouts coming out of our pile, and I'm not honestly sure what that means, but it can't be a bad thing. Some of the paper plates that were in there are finally starting to break down. The forks and knives, not so much. They really need to be put through a pulper to properly break down. Our pile is looking moist and isn't incredibly smelly, so we are looking pretty good so far. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, hopefully we can get some moisture up in there and keep it wet so we don't have to set up the generator and water it ourselves.

Tuesday is photo shoot, lots of composting, maybe a drive to Target. All good things to come.