"The Infra-whatnow?"

The Infragram is a simple, affordable infrared camera platform -- developed collaboratively, by the Public Lab community -- for measuring plant health and geeking out on gardening. It's for home gardeners, hikers, makers, farmers, amateur scientists, teachers, artists, and anyone curious about the secret lives of plants!

It was originally developed to assess damage to wetlands in the wake of the BP oil spill; but it's also a simple, easy-to-modify, open-source hardware and software tool that anyone who's curious about plant physiology and health can use.

Vineyards, large farms, and NASA all use near-infrared photography for assessment, usually by mounting expensive sensors on airplanes and satellites. Infragram brings this technology to average citizens, enabling them to monitor their environment through quantifiable, citizen-generated data.

Just as photography was instrumental to the rise of credible print journalism, DIY data collection technologies like Infragram democratize and improve reporting about environmental impacts.

By creating a low-cost camera and working with farmers and environmental activists, we hope to explore grassroots uses for this kind of technology. What could farmers or activists do with leaf-scale, plant-scale, lot-scale, and field-scale data on plant health if the equipment costs as little as $10 or $35?

The images below depict other prototypes that were created by our community over the years. If you are interested in the story of how this project got started, check out our early prototypes and experiments on this page: http://publiclab.org/wiki/near-infrared-camera-history.