 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Meet the Experts. I'm Katie Wolfson with UCAR Center for Science Education, and we are so excited to bring you Meet the Experts, which is our program we do every other week during the school year where we connect you with experts at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And one of the really amazing things about working for the National Center for Atmospheric Research is there are so many different kinds of jobs that you can have. So you could be a scientist and a researcher, you can be a computer programmer, you can be a systems engineer running supercomputers, you can be a pilot flying research planes in aircraft, you can be a mechanic, you can be a chef, you can be a science educator like Mr. Tim and I who are on this call to help you today. So there are so many different jobs. And so what we love to do is we love to have a chance for you to connect with the folks at the National Center for Atmospheric Research so that you can ask questions and hear about the types of cool research and work that they're doing here. So I'm Katie Wolfson, the science education specialist. A few housekeeping things before we meet our expert is that I wanna invite all of you to stay muted during the program. And at the very end, we'll have a chance to take questions and we'll ask you to unmute if you'd like to. But then and now throughout the whole program, you can type in the chat for questions. So if the teacher has a class, you can go ahead and type questions that your students have throughout the program. And anything that you see during the program that in maybe in the background for our expert, feel free to ask questions about that as well. So stay muted, type us in the chat if you need anything at all, Q and A at the end. And we do have closed captioning available that if you can turn it on and off in Zoom, that is now enabled now. So you can turn it on and off. This recording will be available later as well for you to review probably next week. The last thing I wanna tell you about is that we do have a survey opportunity. We are looking at what our fifth through 12th grade students like and have learned about program programs like Meet the Experts. So we are gonna drop a link to that survey in the chat that we invite the students to fill out if you're in fifth through 12th grade. And even if you've done it before, we would love to have you fill that out again to let us know how we're doing and how we can better improve our programs for you. So without further ado, I would love to turn it over to our expert today. And today we are talking to Ag Velia Miko, also you can call him Ag, who is with the Computational and Information Systems Lab at the National Center for Administrative Research. He's gonna talk to us today about 3D-printed science labs and the Internet of Things. So Ag, are you there? And can you tell us a little bit about what do you mean by Internet of Things? Thank you, Katie. Hi, everyone. Hope you are having a great day. I'd like to chat with you about Internet of Things. Internet of Things is something that you see in your everyday life. You probably have Internet of Things at home. So for example, you may have the term smart homes or you might have an Xbox and the Xbox can connect to other devices inside of your home. So Internet of Things is basically being able to have small devices that you connect to the internet to run various different other things. So now one of the things you'll notice in the Internet of Things can be used in our daily lives, i.e. it could be used for turning on a blender, opening a garage door, it could be used for in terms of your glasses. So here's an example that you'll see here and I would like for you to think of and maybe you can type into the chat or have your teacher type into the chat. What Internet of Things do you use or do you see in your everyday life? So your watch, for example, can control things. You have smart watches. What you'll see here is you can see that there are things like TVs. So you may have an Apple TV that can connect to various different devices and you have things like cooking devices like cookers or kettles. So you'll see oftentimes when you get ready for school in the morning, the coffee machine just turns on and starts producing coffee for your parents or you'll see other devices like that. So yeah, what we're doing is we're taking that concept of using very small devices to do science. So we have a couple of examples. We have some examples coming in, Ag. Would you like to hear what some of them are? Yes, yes, of course. Google Home, Alexa, Ring. So these are all some of the examples and there's, yeah, great. Are those good examples then? Yeah, those are very good examples. And I won't advise you to do this, but if you broke it open and you took it apart, like when one is broken or it's not working, you can actually take it apart and inside of them will be computer chips and there will be computer chips that you see like this one. Here's a small microcontroller that's really tiny. It's about the size of a watch or the size of a quarter. So if you were to break it open and look at what's inside of it, you'll notice that there are little processors inside of them and ways to add electricity and connect them to sensors. So what we're doing with science is we're using these small sensors, small microcontrollers to collect data from the atmosphere. So basically if you have a sensor like this, this little sensor measures what the temperature is, what the relative humidity is, what the air pressure is and it is connected to one of those small little microcontrollers. So now when I break it apart and take the case off, you can see it's a really tiny little microcontroller. So these little things are just like the internet of things that you have at home. When someone drives up to your garage, when you drive home and the garage opens automatically, there's a sensor that's actually pointing out, it can tell when the car is coming and it will be infrared or a little light that you can't see with your eyes, but there's a light that will be beaming down and as soon as the car comes and your parents press the button to open the garage door, you'll notice the garage door opens and you can drive in. That's the internet of thing because it is connected using a simple microcontroller like this and a simple sensor that's looking down and taking that command. Same thing with Alexa. You speak and the sensors hear the command and do something. So we're looking at two different types of sensors and some sensors are smarter or have other features than different sensors. Here's another one. This sensor is called a Raspberry Pi, almost like raspberries that you eat in the pie, but it's actually Raspberry Pi like the numerical Pi and the Raspberry Pi is like a mini little computer. So if you know this here, on this side actually, you can connect a mouse, you can connect the keyboard, you can connect it to the internet and by connecting a mouse, keyboard and you can even connect the monitor to it like on this bit here, just like your Xbox or some other things you have, you can actually connect it to your screen and on here you can have a whole computer and you can program sensors like this to take data, to store the data and to measure the environment. And so when you look at it, you can see this one has a full computer. I can play a video game on here. I can play Solitaire on this Raspberry Pi. This tiny little one, I can't play Solitaire, right? I can't play a video game or I can't send an email because this one doesn't have a full operating system. So in other words, I can't go on here, I can't connect, I mean, there's no real place to connect a computer monitor or a keyboard, right? So I can't do anything super, super, you know, like play video games on it, but I can do other cool stuff like connected to sensors and there are lots of different types of sensors and you could almost think of sensors for anything. So we like to collect data on, you know, rain, precipitate rain, temperature, pressure, all kinds of atmospheric variables that help us determine things like are we gonna go, is it gonna be a snow day tomorrow for school or is it going to, can we ski this weekend and is it gonna be a big ski day? So there are lots of things you can determine with just these tiny little sensors. And one question I might ask is, what would you find interesting to measure? There's a lot of things you could measure. It doesn't necessarily have to be whether it could be weather or, you know, other things that you would like to measure. And if you could type in or let everyone know what are the types of cool measurements you would like to measure. And then we can talk about what kind of sensors could perhaps do some of those measurements that you were referring that we're looking at. So these are sort of the core things that we use inside of it. And then the next step is we have to 3D print. We use a 3D printer to print out the housing or the connection. So what you can see here, and this is sped up very fast, is that we are 3D printing a rain gauge. And now I see some cool answers coming up in terms of what we would like to measure. We see people looking at steps. That's a good one. So if you have inside of your watch, and so now how are steps measured? A lot of times it looks at your watch and as you swing your arms, it has sort of like a measurement to understand how many times are sort of the amount of motion. And based on that motion, it can tell how many steps you make in a day. Another one, let's see, I think Timmer, it went off the screen there, but another one. Well, looks like we also have water intake, particles in air and stream flow. Yes. So particles in the air is another, there's another similar sensor that looks similar to this one. This one measured, actually this one measures VOC, which is like organic compounds. And it gives you sort of an indicator of how many particles are in the air. So when we have in Colorado, we had these forest fires and the forest fires, you can almost your eyes get a little watery. It's a little bit difficult to breathe. And that's something that you'll be able to tell. The miles per hour in the car, that's a really good one because the wind, when you spin a wind gauge around, it tells you miles per hour of wind. So now if you're in a car and you're driving, you can actually pick up how many miles per hour you're driving based on the spin and the rate of spin. And what we have here, and I'm gonna take this thing apart, hope they don't break anything, what we have here. And I think this is a real cool concept is we are using, there's just a little line in here, right? And then there's a sensor that basically counts the amount of times that crosses that line. And it's called revolutions per minute. And once you look at revolutions per minute, you can convert revolutions per minute to miles per hour. So that's exactly the same principle on how a speedometer would work on your car. And it's a- There was a question, how do you measure sound? Now, sound is another one. Sound, you can have a different sensor and we don't have these sensors right now, but you can add it to this. You have the same microcontroller and you can have another sensor that actually measures that collects the sound. It has a microphone and it can collect sound waves and it actually tell you how many decibels of sound that you're having. That's a cool thing now. Think about what we could do with sound, even for science, right? So if there is a very windy day, you're gonna have higher sound, right? If it's a calm day, you're going to have lower sound. So maybe you could use sound sensor to measure storminess or rain, but that would be another even probably better example. We have a rain bucket, right? Where when it rains, the rain comes down, it drops into this bucket, right? And then it actually tips when it fills up this side, it tips over and then it tips over again. But what if we used a sound sensor so that when it rains, the heavier it rains, the louder it is. You could maybe use a sensor like that to determine whether or not it's raining or not or the rain dripping on a piece of plastic or a piece of 3D printed parts. So there's lots of real ways or cool ways that you can use cool little sensors just like Alexa and just like the sensors you have at home to actually do different science things or to discover different ideas that you may have and you want to learn about. So Tim, what else did, this is fun. What else did they... We did have voltage, that's interesting one. And let's see, water intake. Water intake is an interesting one because this is just looking at water falling from the sky, right? So this one as it collects in here on one part it'll tip over and basically we just count the number of tips and that tells you the amount of water intake coming in. Now, if you wanted to do water intake, say in a stream, I might do something like I have a propeller, right? And as the stream comes through, it turns the propeller. And what I can do is look at how fast the propeller moves could tell me how fast, for example, a stream is moving. So that would be one way that you can do it. Another way is you may be able to have something that fills up and then unfills up. So similar to rain bucket, but you turn it in a different direction depending on what you are checking out or what you're trying to measure. If it's a lake, you might have a taller, instead of just a rain bucket like this, you might have something that measures the height of the lake to see how full the tub is or the lake is. So there are lots of different measurements and they would all be collected from our measure and collected with a sensor and some kind of computer to take the information from the sensor and store it onto some kind of device. And we did have one additional, very interesting one and that is measuring how much we sit while we're doing virtual learning like right now. That's another good one. There's another sensor, I have this one. This one is called a compass or an accelerometer. And basically it's like a gyroscope. And you may have seen a gyroscope in some of your science classes and looks at your emotions. And if I spin around in my chair, for example, it knows that I'm spinning around, but it doesn't necessarily, it can also tell that I'm not standing up. So every time you stand up and come down, it will tell you you moved vertically up and down versus you moved around in a circle. So it knows the direction of your spin and the direction of your up and down. So when you're running, for example, you're gonna be bouncing up and down and you're running. So the sensor will know that you're actually running. And you can see this in your Apple Y. So it knows when you're running, it knows when you're like walking because the sensor has sort of like a three-dimensional, you know, multi-dimensional view. It can tell if I'm spinning. It can tell if I'm moving up and down. And because of that, it can also tell when I'm actually just sitting still. And a lot of times to really check that because now what this sensor does is it tells my directions and everything up and down around. What they also add to this is what's called a GPS. And that's a global positioning system. And you might see that in your car, it tells you where you're going on your phone. You can look at Google Maps or sometimes you'll look at your car and tell you exactly where you're going. And you wonder, how does it know that? Well, it has a connection to the satellites and it tells you how you're moving. That technology has gotten so smart that it can fit inside of your watch. So it's tiny just like this. And so together when I have, I know if I'm standing up or if I'm running and then it can tell me my exact position, I can know how active I am in a day. Am I outside doing recess and I'm playing dodgeball or am I outside doing games or am I at home on Zoom? Well, watching things. But then you can see, of course, at the end of the day, how many steps you took. So wonderful. Do you want to show them how it all fits together? Yeah, yeah, let's do that. And then I think we have a couple of slides on this. OK, so we have a weather station and these weather stations come in three different parts. So this part here, and you can see that sort of in the middle, this measures temperature, pressure, relative humidity, air quality. And what you have in here, the sensors just like this fit inside this. And the reason why you have this weird looking, you know, birdhouse almost looking thing is because you want enough air to flow into it, but it not be too closed out so that it gets too hot. It's almost like if you put a dog or animal inside of a car and it's all closed, you have to open the window so you get circulation. It's the same thing here. If we want enough circulation to come through so that you get what's called ambient, or in other words, normal air temperature, air temperature of what's around it. And this is what we call the arrow node. This is one section. So if I can use this on the station, and then the next thing is I have wind. Again, it's the same thing as this, the sensors plug in here, and you have wind direction, and this will turn as the wind direction changes. And then you have wind speed, and all the wind speed is doing is just like measuring speed of a car is I'm actually looking at how many times per minute or per second does this rotate. And based on the rotation of this, it determines the wind speed. That calculation is done on this little computer, which is really cool, right? It just, it counts the spin. This thing could spend 500 or 100 revolutions per minute, and it will tell you exactly how many miles per hour that is with very high accuracy because it's using a very simple formula to calculate that. And then last is we have the rain bucket. And then the rain bucket is basically used to collect rain. And one of the things that you'll notice on this bucket is we have this little net. And I wonder if you could guess why we do that. And we have this because we learned in a interesting way that sometimes if you don't have something covering it at least holding it up, birds or other things will come in a nest in here. So instead of having the birds go there, we prefer them to stay in the trees. And we just put this on top so that the rain can come through, but other critters can't. So that's pretty much what we did here. So what happens is all of these instruments all have sensors and they all have computers, little microcontrollers. Now these little microcontrollers, believe it or not, also have Wi-Fi, just like you have Wi-Fi at home and just like your Xbox or your telephone or even your watch all have Wi-Fi, these sensors also have Wi-Fi. And one of the things that the sensors allow you to do is to collect information and to collect anything. Like if I'm doing steps, if I'm walking through the day, it's counting my steps and it has a little Wi-Fi that can then send that information out to us or to you at home. And then you can look at a little app on your phone. And once you take your phone out and you look at the app, it'll tell you how many steps, it'll tell you what the temperature and what the rain is. And that's the same thing we've made here. So what we've done is you actually program these. So you take these and you plug it in just like this, but you plug it into the computer and when you plug this into your computer, you can tell it here is the program or the software to read data from your sensor. And once it has that software, it can read the data from the sensor and always send information back to the user. Now I see there's a few questions. Yes, we do have a couple of questions. One is in regards to privacy with all the monitoring that these little, the microprocessors can do. And the other question is what kind of 3D printer could an elementary school use or purchase to do this kind of work? Okay, so on the privacy front, there's a number of ways, especially on these stations. These are controlled 100% by you or the user. So when I take this data, I tell it where to send the data. So I have complete control over my data. So I can choose who I can share it with or who I don't want to share it with. So that's a very good thing is that you can control where privacy is automatically opt in, in other words, you get to choose. Second, on the other thing, basically 3D printers have come down in costs. So 3D printers now, they cost, I guess the most basic 3D printer costs around $200. And it can still do the job, right? So it takes time to print these things. For example, each one of these pieces, depending on how big your 3D printer is, we have to be printed individually, right? So, and maybe this one piece right here might take about 30, 45 minutes to print. Another piece will take 35, 45 minutes. So each piece takes time and it may take, depending on if you did it all on one full day, that would be a long day, but you could sit down all day and print it and you'd be up very late. Or you could do it like one classroom day, print one piece or two pieces. The next day you come back to class, you print another two pieces. And it would take a couple of weeks to print all of these things out. But the good news is that you don't have to print them all out at once. So I could just print this and have the sensors and put this outside and I would be able to collect temperature, pressure, relative humidity, air quality. I would have all of that just with this one thing. Then later on, I could come back and print the rain bucket. And then now I have rain and I know what, how much it's raining and everything else. And last I could come back and I can print the pieces for these things. Like this piece right here, some of these pieces are pretty sturdy, right? So they take a little bit of time to print out. We also did have a question about, how do you keep the insects out? Yeah, so that's a really good question. So on the rain bucket, we have this. So that is more for birds. Little insects could probably get in here, right? If you, depending on how small they are, could get in here. Spiders, I think you probably would not go in there. So that's good. And then another thing we do, and I'll show this example, is we use PVC pipe to connect all of this stuff. And when it's put outside, it's used with these PVC pipes. So what we do is we make sure when we connect it, it's very much sealed, right? So that little critters and bugs can't get inside and chew on the wires. So the wires will come through these pieces and come down to a battery. And we make sure that that's really sealed tight and really sealed and we add glue and make sure that no critters can get inside. Excellent. And I will share also a website, right? Ag, there's a place that if students want to go print one of the weather stations using your design, right? They can find that online? Yes. So we have a site online where we show how to, and this is still a work in progress, but we show how to build and print a station. So this is like open source. So basically like, if you know how Apple and Google, you can build your own apps. This is the same thing, similar thing, where it's all online and you can download the original plans, you can print the document, you can print the stations, we show you where to, we have links on how you can get the different sensors. A lot of these things are available either on a company called Mauser or Amazon or somewhere it's like online, they're very low cost things. So for example, this little microcontroller cost $6 or $7. One of these sensors you can get between $4 and some of the more expensive sensors, depending on what you want to measure can be $15 or $20. So it all depends on what you want to measure and depending on what you wanna measure, you can also come up with your own sensors. So for example, people mentioned other different things like stream flows or maybe you wanna measure soil moisture. One thing like if I wanna have a soil moisture sensor, there's another sensor that we stick in the soil and if I water a plant, it will tell that the ground is wet and then when the ground goes drier, it'll actually give you an alert and let you know that you need to water the plant again. So that's another thing. I see people use sensors to tell them when to feed the fish, like they have a fish tank with a bunch of fish in the tank, you can actually have a sensor that knows when and how often you feed your fish. So there's lots of cool things you can do with 3D printers and with just some low cost sensors. Wonderful. Well, we are actually a couple of minutes over on time. I think if you're free Ag, we can stay on and answer some more questions. I see more coming in the chat. I did put the link to that Internet of Things manual in the chat as well. If you want to check it out, please check it out. Thank you so much for coming. I want to respect everyone's time as we need to take off, but we would love to continue answering questions. And if anybody wants to ask questions over the microphone, you can type in the chat and just say, I have a question and we'll call on you. Happy to do that as well. I see one question coming from Mr. Birch's class. Can you also get different colors for the 3D printing or only white? We can have different colors. So in this one, we have like we have a different color or this one is a black color. There's also purple, you can get yellow. They have one that is actually wood and they can you can 3D print and it basically takes like wood shavings and it can be printed. Ag, were you into computers and weather and things like that in high school as well? Yeah, very much so. I did science fair. I guess I started science fair in like eighth grade. And then computing a lot of different computing things like science Olympiad. I was at the high school in New Mexico in New Mexico and I also did a super computing challenge way back in the day. And here's some just pictures of me back in the day in junior high slash high school. And you can see that I worked on, I did like lots of different science fairs across country that I did there as well and wrestling, I was on the wrestling team. So yeah, so it was kind of a mix of things but I really always enjoyed doing fun stuff with science. Right, I'm seeing questions slow down and some folks might need to take off. So I think one more question for you Ag before we go is, is there anything that you want to share with the students, any final words or advice that you have for them if they're interested in this kind of thing? Yeah, well, I mean, if you're passionate or you have a problem or something that you'd like to see solved, just go after it and try to figure out if there are little sensors and just study it and see what's online now and try to come up with a solution. And it doesn't necessarily have to, you don't necessarily have to just be an engineer or a scientist. A lot of times solutions to problems take people not just, it takes a diverse people, right? It takes people who are artists, people who know how to design things. iPhone, for example, is a beautiful phone, but it's not just the engineers who make iPhones and you have people who are artists who make it work and like the user has such a good experience because there are people who are not just scientists working on a problem, but also artists and social scientists and others. So your talents can always be applied to solve some of the world's problems that we see and things that could make the world a better place. Oh, Katie, I think you're muted. I'm muted. Wonderful, thank you so much, Ag. Thank you, students for connecting to us from all over and asking such wonderful questions. We're excited to see what you do. Maybe you'll start 3D printing some awesome science labs of your own or beautiful art pieces, all sorts of things. So thank you so much for your questions. Thanks for joining us for Meet the Experts today and thank you to everyone who's joined us for Meet the Experts throughout the school year. We're gonna take a little break for the summer but we will be back in the fall with the next generation Meet the Experts 2.0. So we hope to see you all there. Ag, thank you again so much for showing us a bit about what you do and introducing yourself to all of us. Oh, thank you. Awesome, thanks, everybody. We'll see you later. Bye. Bye. Bye.