My original idea  the hiking hack was a very practical, very serious soil testing shoe attachment, but my brain took a direction 180° from my initial thoughts – finger puppets! What could be more practical and serious than finger puppets, right? Although finger puppets may not seem utilitarian, potentially they can serve an educational purpose,…

Matt Swarts and Andy Quitmeyer came up with a way to cheaply power laptops and other high-voltage devices off cheap powerpacks! Difficulty: Medium-easy. We cha The Problem Laptops demand lots of power. They also usually need to charge from voltage source that is much higher than the 5 volts you can get out of cheap…

Context: First, a report that a young boy was lacerated by a bear in a forest near us and a suggestion that we build a bear detector. A week before, JY learned how to solder and program an arduino to make an LED blink like one of the firefly species. A day before, she got…

Jeannette Yen- Scientists often rationalize that our advancement of knowledge is equal to the costs of the lives of living organisms. It isn’t. I took disdain at this idea. Instead, with the advances in modern high image resolution in time and space of the digital age, we now can produce large magnified images that are…

After a long day at the SCCDL (South Citico Creek Digital Laboratory :P) and a great Turkey Tetrazinni and Raspberry Crumble, we decided to take a stroll to observe some fireflies!!   We merely walked around a hundred yards from base camp. We used flashlights to reach the observation site. However, we had to stand or…

Challenge One of the most useful, yet also most potentially frustrating, tools for ethologists is the handheld ethogram device. This pocket computer has re-programmable buttons that allow a researcher to capture details of organismal behavior including action type, order, frequency and duration. The challenge in using a handheld ethogram is its un-intuitive interface. The design…

The party boat activity prompt was just to take a bunch of outputs and link them together in a way that might stimulate some sort of organism. Basically, it’s just use a combination of natural and digital materials to make a thing that makes noises and flashes lights and things like that. While digging through…

We tried to generate power from Citico Creek using a fire hose and some sort of generator. This was originally Scott Gilliland’s idea, and we volunteered to put this craziness to the test by carrying an extra compatible hose all the way down the mountain with us! We were trying to make it entirely gravity…

The first question we always get when talking about making electronics and computers in the wilderness is how to power all of our tools. During this trip we tested out numerous different ways of getting the electrical power our devices needed.   Needs From extremely rough estimates of previous hiking hacks, we came up with…