This page is a description of Public Lab's efforts to develop low-cost open hardware tools for assessing water quality in the Mystic River watershed. The Mystic River faces serious water quality problems, shared by urban water bodies around the world: leaky sewer pipes, waste disposal sites, excessive nutrients, discharges of sewage, fuel hydrocarbons, road salt; and its Alewife Brook subwatershed is one of the most contaminated water bodies in Boston. The Mystic River watershed received a ‘D’ from the US EPA on its 2012 water quality report card.

IOBY Campaign

Public Lab is partnering with IOBY to develop a low-cost water quality monitoring network for the Mystic River. Here's the crowd-funding campaign, which ends February 14th:

Mystic River Open Water IOBY Campaign

Water Quality Monitor Prototypes

We're currently basing our data logger prototype on the amazing open source hardware project the "mchck" -- a very inexpensive, low-power microcontroller design with on-board flash memory, a RTC.

Our fork of the mchck project is here, with datalogger functionality implemented here.

The shield we're developing for the mchck that will include hardware for measuring conductivity, temperature, and water depth is here.

References

• "Effects of road salt and Phragmites australis invasion on the vegetation of a Western Massachusetts calcareous lake-basin fen" -- paper