DIY electronics and computing bring pollution detection to the masses.

Natalie Jeremijenko had packs of robot dogs.  Beatriz da Costa had flocks of cellular pigeons.  Myriel Milicevic made finding air polllution fun.  In the first decade of the 21st century, these and other artists were in the vanguard of wresting powerful environmental monitoring devices from the realm of specialists, and putting them into the hands of average citizens.

They also brought wit and whimsey to the downbeat business of detecting potential environmental hazards.

Today any concerned individual with no fear of a soldering iron or a sewing needle can easily find the instructions and supplies to build homegrown environmental sensing gear. It's called "physical computing": creating programmable devices that respond in some way to what's around them, such as light, motion, or the presence of particular substances.

The costs have come down to earth as well. Whle the price of the professional-grade air quality sensor used by your local environmental quality department can run into tens of thousands of dollars, the hardware for a DIY device can cost just a couple hundred dollars. Maybe less, depending upon the project's complexity.

Engineer-artist Jeremijenko is one of the most visible figures in the "democratization" of both electronics and science.  In her 2003 work "Feral Robotic Dogs," she led student teams in taking apart readily available mechanical toy dogs, fitting them with sensors and basic communications devices, and then setting them loose in vacant urban lots. When one dog sniffed out a pollutant, the pack would converge, making otherwise invisible contamination easily visible to human bystanders.

Beatriz da Costa, another engineer-artist, equipped homing pigeons with miniature backpacks loaded with (extremely tiny) devices to measure common pollutants and transmit data to the web, for her 2006 project "Pigeon Blog." Once released, the flock of birds "wrote" a real-time air pollution index as it flew back to the coop.  Also in 2006, Milicevic culminated his graduate studies in interaction design with "Neighborhood Satellites," a project involving toy-like, networked, satellite-shaped handheld devices equpped to detect air pollution. Players walked around their neighborhoods with the devices; the more often a player detected different "pollution clouds," the better she/he scored compared to other players. Strange as it may sound, the game made collecting depressing pollution data fun and collaborative, while also amassing a significant body of information about local environmental conditions.

At around the same time, enthusiast-publishers were bringing web sites online that for little or low cost, offered instructions on building, wiring, and programming all sorts devices, including some to detect pollution.  Today the leaders in this realm include:

• Instructables, a highly pragmatic compendium of instructions for all sorts of DIY goodness.  Site members create the step-by-step projects, and support each other's work via online community. Check out these instructions for creating a device that "[smells] overall gas levels for a variety of nasties, including ethanol, methane, formaldehyde, and a bunch of other volatile organic compounds."
• Make Magazine, perhaps the vanguard publication of contemporary electronic DIY, has an extensive web site with extra content. Projects here range from down-to-earth to cutting edge -- like "Grabber," an adorable small robot that scoots around on chunky treads, picking stray bottles up off the floor. This highly prototypical 'bot is probably not coming soon to a litter-bedecked park near you, but it does suggest the shape of things to come.

Below, a few books that teach the foundation skills for devising, building, and programming environmental monitoring devices:

• Arduino: A Quick-Start Guide, Maik Schmidt, Pragmatic Bookshelf, $35: A newly published how-to guide for using Arduino, the open-source microcontroller board-plus-simple programming platform that is central to the current wave of DIY physical computing. I'm still working up to tackling my first project using Arduino, but an Arduino-literate friend says of this book, "Wow, this is great."
• Fashioning Technology: A DIY Intro to Smart Crafting, Syuzi Pakhchyan, O'Reilly, $29.99: The blog Fashioning Technology tracks the evolution of clothing+computing, as well as conceptual textiles and fashion. It's covered environmentally oriented projects ranging from a couture "climate dress" artfully decked with sensors that measure greenhouse gases, to "micro-nutrient" edible garb made from gelatin film and agar-agar. This book, based on the blog, features more approachable projects that combine sewing, circuitry, and Arduino programming to create clothing and accessories that respond in some way to the environment around them.
• Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects, Tom Igoe, O'Reilly, $29.99: "Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun," reads the back cover of Making Things Talk. "But when devices that you've built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting." Written by one of inventors of Arduino, this book explores how to get your sensing devices to communicate--the step that turns raw information into data that can be collected, transmitted over communications platforms such as the internet or Bluetooth, and presented in understandable ways.

What are some other resources for DIY environmental monitoring?

Image: A Lilypad Arduino microcontroller board, actual size.