A major goal of Public Laboratory is to produce simple and easy guides to construct many of our low-cost tools. Here are some of the illustrated guides, tutorials, and other supporting materials we've put together so far:

Illustrated Guides to Grassroots Mapping with balloons and kites

• http://grassrootsmapping.org/guide - Our first illustrated guide attempts to thoroughly explain how to construct and use a balloon mapping kit.
• Grassroots Mapping Guide 2.0, (1mb pdf) - This improved version of the guide is more concise (prints on 4 pages, or a single 11x17 sheet, double sided) and has been updated with more recent, simpler, more reliable techniques. It is available for anyone to edit or modify as a Google Doc.

Translations

• Castellano/Spanish: Guía ilustrada de hacer mapas con globos o cometas PDF (1mb, 4 pages)
• Portuguese: Guia ilustrado para Mapear Comunidades de base com balões e pipas [Google Presentation, 4 pages)]

Spectrometer Guides

• Making a spectrometer:
  • plots-spectrometer-guide.pdf (17.4mb)
  • plots-spectrometer-guide-small.pdf (4.3kb)
  • Parts and Crafts revised spectrometry booklet (fantastic!): http://archive.publiclaboratory.org/download/partsandcrafts-spectrometer-guide.pdf (21mb, print quality)

In progress

We're constantly improving and exploring new ways of documenting and disseminating our designs. Here are some prototypes and planning pages:

• T-shirt guide - A t-shirt with instructions for balloon mapping printed on it.

In-progress Translations:

• Arabic: https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AVY4Tg28DhosZGM0OHd6M2RfMjU5Y3o2NXEzZG0&hl=en_US