Water Sensor

At Jeff's suggestion, i've looked into what would be required to build a decent water sensor for the XO laptop. A basic set of would requirements would be

• a microcontroller (fairly cheap, probably go with a PIC)
• Salinity sensor (cheap)
• PH Sensor (rather expensive)
• sensors for chemicals commonly dumped into streams in el salvador (generally cheap, though some sensors have to be more sensitive driving up costs

Most everything else can be salvaged from old electronics or borrowed ( hopefully i can convince someone to let me borrow a PIC debug board,otherwise all testing will have to be in emulation)

Plan of attack:

1. Get in contact members of other XO sensor board projects
2. Emulate sample io between sensors > microcontroller/ microcontroller > XO | analog-digital conversion will probably take the most planning
3. Build one real world prototype (almost all components can be found at a well stocked radioshack or old equipment thats being thrown out)
4. If successful ,figure out a way to lay out on PCB, and build several for use in El Salvador