Contributed by Bryson Mattox

We monitor the marsh to measure the salinity and temperature to see if the water is good for the alewives. This way we can see if they would come into the marsh and spawn and eventually have more and more alewives. Our middle school science teacher Mrs. England said that we should have alewives coming into the marsh. We would like to see if the salinity and temperature is good for the alewives to mate.  Studying the marsh is a project that has go back for many years here is a link to some history.https://alewives.edublogs.org/

Mrs. England asked if I wanted to help build a salinity and temperature monitor for the marsh. I thought that it would be fun and I like to build things. Mr. Meinersmann (our Technology Manager & Makerspace Director and I talked over the plan and what we wanted to have it do. After Mr. Meinersmann gave me an overview of where he got the inspiration from and he shared the article with me Development of a Low-Cost Arduino-Based Sonde. We started to build it, but about a third of the way though the build we hit a road block. Soon after that I emailed Brian Dzwonkowski, an author from the article, and asked if he could point me to some help. He led me to Grant Lockridge, also an author from the article, and after and hour and a half conference call together, he gave me and Mr. Meinersmann tips on how to build the monitor and write the code.

So far, I’ve been working on the Temperature sensor.  The temperature sensor does not tell you the temperature it tells you a change in voltage and with the code we have to convert that it to a temperature. I had to solder the conductivity and the temperature sensor to the right spot. When I was soldering it was tricky to get the wire, the solder, and the soldering iron in the same place at the same time. luckily the magnetic arms were there.

We are definitely making progress!