Clean water is a tough commodity to come by in most of the developing world or even California for that matter. There are several low-cost methods to treat ‘shady looking’ water but the equipment needed to test the water before and after its cleaned are costly and some are even lab bound, meaning they’re not portable.
To get around those issues Joshua M. Pearce and his team from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Michigan Technological Institute designed a new low-cost open sourced 3D printed Water Testing Platform.
Their platform was designed using OpenSCAD modeling software with the inner electronics consisting of an Arduino, microcontroller and LED display shield, which is paired with firmware acquired from GitHub (also open source) that provides menu navigation for the devices various functions.
All of those electronics are packed inside a portable polymer case created using a RepRap 3D printer, which makes for a truly open sourced, cheaply produced efficient water tester that can be used anywhere. For more information on the Open Source Water Testing Platform head here for the academic paper. You can find the files for building one on Libre3D.
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