Doug Ellison (@doug_ellison), Engineering Camera Team Lead at NASA’s JPL and Martian photographer, spoke with us about low power systems, cameras, clouds, and dust devils on Mars.
The best paper for learning more is from NASA’s JPL site: The Mars Science Laboratory Engineering Cameras
Cy Keener spoke with us about sensors, Arduinos, ice, and the crossover between art and science.
You can see some of his field work and gallery installations at his site: cykeener.com and on his vimeo channel. Cy is an art professor at the University of Maryland (bio, youtube)
Cy’s advisor at Stanford was Paul DeMarinis (pauldemarinis.org, Stanford page).
Arduiniana: a blog of useful Arduino libraries
We also talked about some custom sensors by Lovro Valcic of Bruncin (bruncin.com).
Kristen Dorsey explained MEMS sensors: how do they work, how they are made, and what new ones we expect to see in the future.
Kristen’s website is kristendorsey.com. She is a professor of engineering at Smith College and runs the MicroSmithie.
MEMS stands for microelectromechanical systems (Wiki). Used in some sensors, Galistan is a room-temp liquid with interesting properties (Wiki).
A few interesting MEMS applications:
One of Kristen's stretchy strain sensor, not MEMS (so you can see it)