Data
Credit: By Luke Legay on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Collecting your own data from sensors can open up new ways of storytelling, when reporting environmental issues, for example. But it can be a daunting process for those without a technical background.

Now Open Pipe Kit, a prototype which recently received a $35,000 (£22,734) grant from the Knight Foundation, wants to makes this practice accessible for those who can't code.

"Our design goal is that it becomes a reality and normal that your average person can collect data from sensors and put that data somewhere that is meaningful to them," explained project lead R.J. Steinert.

"So with that in mind, whether you're a sensor journalist, citizen scientist, farmer, or just somebody who wants to know whether or not their basement is flooding, that it's a useful tool."

Open Pipe Kit will enable people to collect data from sensors and store it into any database they want. The 'pipe' is the software that sits between the sensor and your database, and "flows data", explained Steinert.

Each sensor and database will need its own driver in order to function, so at the moment the Pipe Kit is open in alpha as a tool for developers.

Once this step is completed, which Steinert hopes will take about two months, the team can focus on testing the 'pipe' and building a graphical user interface – a mobile app to configure the kit.

The first 'pipe' device the software will target is the Raspberry Pi.

"Essentially what we want it to be is for people to go to their hardware store and pick up the materials for the pipe," he explained.

"There's a piece of software that you download that we'll be publishing and you put it on a small memory card and then you plug in your sensor.

"So then you've built your pipe and as soon as that's done and you point your phone at it. There will be an app that we'll develop, that recognises pipes in the area, [and] allows you to configure it."

open pipe screenshot
Screenshot from the Knight Foundation.

The idea was born from Steinert's work with the Public Laboratory, which supports grassroots data collection, and Farm Hack, a farming innovation community, where he was often asked to build a tool that would take data from one sensor and save it into a database.

He set out to build a way for people to be able to do that without having to build a different tool every time a new sensor was needed.

"We wanted to stop doing the same thing over and over again, reinventing the wheel," he said.

The Public Laboratory received a $500,000 grant (£324,842) from the Knight Foundation in 2011, and focuses on building tools and resources that enable people to engage with real-time data gathering in their communities.

Before the Public Laboratory was formally set up, the team was mapping beaches affected by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by using cameras attached to balloons and kites, for example.

The Open Pipe Kit will be tested with water and air quality monitoring among other use cases, said Steinert.

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