We're teaming up with the Rural Rivers / Mapping for Resilience project on low-cost, community-run flood monitoring.

Rural Rivers is a research-for-resilience effort — led by researchers at Dartmouth College and the Colorado School of Mines, working alongside flood-impacted communities in the Black and White River Valleys of rural Vermont, which have weathered repeated major floods over the past fifteen years. The project studies how communities respond to overlapping crises, and how clearer communication and better information can strengthen local resilience.

Timely information about how high the water is getting is a big part of that picture — and it's exactly what our water-level sensor is designed to provide.

The sensor is a MeshCore-based ultrasonic water-level monitor: an ultrasonic rangefinder measures the distance down to the water's surface, and the reading is relayed over LoRa mesh radio — so it keeps reporting even where there's no cell service or internet. It's inexpensive to build, can run on solar, and is designed to be set up by anyone.

If you'd like to build and configure one, everything you need is on the configuration page for the water-level sensor → — flash the firmware, pair the two devices, and connect to WiFi, right from your browser.

Halé and I met up at pasture to talk about ways of weaving WFS curricula into activities that would support Goodwin Hill Goats: helping with feeding and care of the goats, foraging for supplemental goat greens, and helping with infrastructure upkeep and repair. Looking forward to more brainstorming soon!

Testing out toaster-oven soldering techniques at Artisans Asylum with Mike; with a little bit of tweaking, we were able to get both ovens set up nicely, allowing for parallel surface mount soldering of small boards! Looking to use this technique to make more blinky boards and radio nodes soon …

Craig and I met up with Ben and Alex of Edgewood Sailing School to brainstorm about various STEM workshop ideas for their 2026 Sailing School, including an introduction to mesh radio. We're also planning on setting up a water level sensor on the dock, sending its data via mesh radio to the internet. More soon!

An "Intro to Solar Power" workshop for a Girl Scout troop at the West Medford Community Center — what a fun day! We used simple voltmeters to measure solar panel voltages, and then wired up two solar panels in series to power a small motor. We also experimented with LEDs and coin cell batteries, and used a 'nibbler' (a drill with an attachment that can safely cut thin sheet material), powered by a larger solar panel, to cut custom shapes out of cardboard. We're planning more meetups soon!

We're installing a window, upgrading the roof, and getting ready to add a solar panel; get ready for the WFS trailer to make an appearance at farms and parks in the Greater Boston area soon!

What we worked on

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The setup

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Findings

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Next steps

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We spent the day trying to make some calibration curves with our open source UV-254 instrument. Picnic-table open science for the win!

We spent a fun day at Artisans Asylum working with Dorn's design for a Raspberry-Pi-based, decentralized data storage and data sharing platform for farmers.

Mike suggested that we could make a simple circuit where a supercapacitor serves as a quick-to-charge, quick-to-discharge battery. This would let us easily measure changes in voltage and current during charging and discharging on a reasonable timescale — something that's hard to observe with conventional batteries, which take hours to cycle.

Because supercapacitors can be charged and discharged virtually unlimited times without degradation, they make an ideal hands-on model for exploring how batteries work. The setup could also double as a practical device: a small crank-powered flashlight, using a DC motor as a generator to charge the supercapacitor.

We'll be designing the circuit soon and using it in upcoming workshops.