Every useful electronics project deserves a good enclosure. Providing a proper case for your circuit can protect it from accidental spills & falls - plus give it a cool look you can proudly show off to those unfamiliar with soldering and such.
Follow along with Collin as he turns a barebones function generator kit into a sturdy and versatile tone-box fit for noise-jamming & testing purposes. Get more info and a parts bundle:
Every piece of plastic ever made still exists today, and much of this plastic has traveled from our hands to our oceans. The most important thing you can do is use less plastic. Join the Blue movement and sign the plastic pledge at SaveMyOceans.com.
In the days and weeks following the January 12th earthquake, relief organizations and redevelopment efforts swarmed into Haiti—fueled by the immediacy to rescue survivors and develop temporary living scenarios. Now, with the disaster out of the headlines and the rainy season looming, opinions and direction are swirling as to “how” to construct a new Haiti. Will social venture prevail? How will the Haitian community be justly represented? How can the cycle of poverty be reversed and a more self-sufficient economy nurtured? Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, and Peter Haas, founder of Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group [AIDG], explain their perspectives, fears and truths surrounding the epic redevelopment effort.
School Collapse at the Petite Ecole Francaise in Cap Haitien, Haiti
I got the call in the morning on Feb 16. Edline Estimable, our bookkeeper in Haiti, was in shock, utterly distraught. An elementary school down the street from our office in Cap Hatien had just collapsed just days after schools reopened. Several of her friends’ children attended the Petite Ecole Francaise. Already wrung out by the events of Jan 12, she couldn’t bare to say it or even think it, but she knew deep down that some of her friends’ kids had been hurt if not killed. But what happened? There had been a lot of rain in Cap that was for sure, but there hadn’t a new earthquake, not even the mildest tremor in Haiti’s 2nd largest city (100+ km away from the capital Port-au-Prince). It turns out it was a mud and rockslide. The school abutted too close to a rocky hillside. The rains had softened the earth; boulders and mud slipped and slalomed down, crashing through the school’s roof. Four 8-10 year old children died — 3 girls and a boy. Edline knew 2 of them. 8 others were wounded.
Jessica Lozier, our interim Haiti Program Manager, had just picked up our 3rd team of structural engineers from the Cap airport when the accident happened. This had been a week of horrors for Jess. A few days before she had been in Port-au-Prince and had witnessed a horrific hit-and-run. She and our colleagues at SOIL helped bring the injured pedestrians to the nearest hospital. Now in Cap, she was helping pull out some of the hurt children as well as translate for foreign doctors who had been volunteering in country.
“It was madness,” said Jess Lozier, coordinator for Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, who arrived at the scene an hour after the accident. Lozier’s group works to provide sanitation, electricity and clean water to developing countries.
Haitian National Police officers and doctors from the group Help Haiti Heal scrambled to dig surviving children from the rubble, as did U.S. Army troops. It was not known how many other children were in the classroom at the time.
“The director of the school said all the other kids were accounted for,” Lozier said.
In the aftermath of this accident, schools reclosed. The 7.0 earthquake in Pap had shown that schools were some of the least seismically resistant buildings in the city. Parents all over the country were already very much afraid and now this.
What’s wrong with the current building techniques used in Haiti?
While the school tragedy in Cap was not related the earthquakes per se, it further underscored the shoddy construction of buildings all over the country, not just in the metro Port-au-Prince area.
Andre Filiatrault, director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER) who led our 1st team of earthquake engineers in January, lists the following issues as primary problems:
In an interview with NPR, Craig Totten from KPFF who we have been working closely with, had this to say:
[W]hat he and [Darlene] Clovis have seen, in building after building, is soft mortar, poorly mixed concrete and rickety columns. The cinderblocks are made from material so grainy that it peels away with your fingernails.
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve been working with groups like MCEER, KPFF Consulting Engineers and the Association of Haitian American Engineers of New York to perform structural assessments of standing and partially collapsed buildings for the government, the UN, NGOs and the community.
Marc-Henri Gateau, Anne Monnier, and Mike Suomi inspecting structures in Cite Soleil
Ron Kernan and Sophia Tassy finish off an inspection
To date we’ve reviewed over 1250 structures. For our small staff, this has been a monumental undertaking. The team on the ground now in Haiti hasn’t had much of a break timewise or emotionally.
In the weeks after the earthquake, it was clear that homeowners, business owners, private citizens, and masons needed more than just reviews. If they were going to prevent the countless needless tragedies, they needed information on how to build back better. We know that most of the damaged and destroyed homes will be rebuilt by private citizens and local contractors out of masonry, concrete and steel. Without access to information on better building techniques, the same deadly mistakes that brought down houses in the quake will be made. So in partnership with Architecture for Humanity and KPFF, we’ve begun to retrain masons in Port-au-Prince, Léogâne and Jacmel in confined masonry techniques. The same techniques have been used in Chile to make buildings there resistant to earthquakes 700 times stronger than the one seen in Port-au-Prince. Here I must commend the leadership of Craig Totten, a principal at KPFF who got the partners at his firm to commit to sending a rotating roster of their engineers to Haiti to continue doing assessments. He’s also recruited masons in the Portland area to work with us to perform trainings of masons.
Craig McMurtrie from ABC Australia accompanied the team (Craig Totten, Shawn Anderson, Darlene Clovis, Clem Fleck and Robert Miller from Portland based Fleck Masonry and AIDG’s Adajah Codio) on a mason’s training in Jacmel and filed this story:
Duration: 5 minutes 58 seconds
To date we have trained approximately 560 masons. Our initial goal with this project is 3000 over 10 months. At the rate that we’re going now, we think we can bump that number up to 10,000, but it all depends on funding. We need $190,000 - $250,000 to hit that goal.
In terms of curriculum we’re using a translated version of “Construction and maintenance of masonry houses” by Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and SENCICO, originally edited by Marcial Blondet. The translation was crowdsourced by volunteers from HaitiRewired, a project of WIRED.com. The April 12, 2010 Kreyol version can be found here. Graphics are currently being upgraded to better reflect the building styles in Haiti.
In response to the devastating 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti Jan 12, 2010, AIDG is doing rapid investments in local businesses that can help with the reconstruction. One of these businesses is Shelter2Home-Haiti SA. The company, which will be based in the northern city of Cap-Haitien, produces emergency and transitional shelters from light gauge galvanized steel that can later be converted into permanent homes. AIDG’s Steve Lee interviews S2H CEO Donald Stevens in Port-au-Prince.
Consider this post a Wikipedia-style stub. I’ll be updating it with more detailed information in a few days.
08 December 2009 - UN MINUSTAH: The “biodigestor” - a pilot project in a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince is making methane gas for electricity, using human waste from public toilets. If successful, the project would provide an alternative, green fuel to wood charcoal, and could help the country overcome its massive environmental problems linked to deforestation.
One poor neighborhood in Haitis capital, Port-au-Prince, is the scene of a new pilot project that will provide new sources of energy, and improve basic sanitation on the streets.
The project starts with some public toilets. Here, for the price of about a penny (US$0.01) residents have the chance to clean up, and use the bathroom. In most Haitian cities, people dont have access to running water. So modern toilets are a real luxury. Particularly when they are open to the public.
SOUNDBITE (Creole) Aline Saint-Fort, Public Bathroom Attendant:
Other public toilets are no where near as clean. And they are expensive. In most places in the city you pay five or even ten cents to use the bathroom thats ten times what we charge.
With the capacity to take one thousand users a day, the project hopes to improve sanitation. But the real benefit is a by-product produced in the yard outside. Engineers with Viva Rio, the Brazilian NGO that runs the project, built this large underground reaction tank called a biodigestor. Inside it are bacteria that are transforming human waste into methane gas a biofuel that can be used as a powerful, and virtually free, source of energy.
SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Valmir FACHINI, Project Coordinator, Viva Rio:
The way it works is simple. The waste comes from the toilets, and gets dumped into the reaction tank. This starts the fermentation process, the produces bio-gas. The gas crosses a column of water, and comes to rest at the top of the tank. This bio-gas can be used for cooking and electricity.
The fermentation inside the bio-digestor also enriches the roots of the surrounding foliage, which act as a filter for liquid waste.
SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Valmir FACHINI, Project Coordinator, Viva Rio:
This reactor has a capacity to produce fifty cubic meters of biogas per day. This will generate 3000 watts of electricity per twenty four hours.
Biogas is cheap and easy to produce. If the project is replicated, it could give Haitians green alternatives to charcoal fuel. This would combat deforestation the underlying cause of the countrys massive environmental problems.
And thats not all. Filtered water coming out of the bio-digestor is rich in nutrients and can support many forms of plant and animal life. Ducks feed on insect larvae. And fish prosper here. With proper care this pond will become a fishery, creating food and jobs in the neighborhood.
SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Valmir FACHINI, Project Coordinator, Viva Rio:
Here in these tanks, the water comes rich with nutrients. The sunlight permits the production of algae. And the algae are the primary food source for fish.
So one pilot project in Port-au-Prince is helping an underserved neighborhood to produce green energy and improve sanitation at the same time.
An 8min time capsule of Haiti, Pre/Post Earthquake! Jean Jean-Pierre and the Dominican Republic Symphonic Orchestra
Conductor: José Antonio Molina
The Dominican Republic National Choir
Conductor: José Enrique Espin
Composer/Producer: Jean Jean-Pierre
Director: Yvetot Gouin
This is a very powerful piece. Note that there is some graphic imagery, specifically of several casualties of the quake. Viewer discretion advised.
This past February, AIDG gave Haitian solar start-up, ENERSA, a $15,000 emergency loan to help it rebuild its factory damaged in the January 12 earthquake that rocked the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.
Duration: 2 minutes 14 seconds
Before the quake struck, Enersa was the fastest growing solar company in Haiti, with contracts in all 10 departments and installations in 58 cities and remote villages. The 2 and a half year old company is the brainchild of Haitian born Jean Ronel Noël and Alex Georges who met in graduate school in Montreal while pursuing degrees in mechanical engineering and business administration. In 2000, the two decided they needed to return to Haiti to start a business that could create positive change in their home country.
Enersa’s product line includes solar street lighting, residential and commercial solar systems, and solar chargers for smaller devices like cell phones and lamps. They initially settled on LED streetlights as a flagship product after seeing Japanese company Nichia’s white LEDs in action on Montreal’s streets. The big question for them at the time was what would they use as an energy source if they wanted to port this technology to Haiti. Haiti’s electricity infrastructure was notoriously unreliable in urban zones and nonexistent in rural areas. However, the country’s location in the sun-drenched tropics and the relatively modest energy requirements of LED systems made solar an attractive option for the Enersa team, if a suitable price point could be reached.
In steps Richard Comp of Maine Solar and Skyheat who would come to be Noel and Georges’ mentor. He introduced the team to methods of solar fabrication including inexpensive ways of encapsulating PV cells. Through Skyheat, Comp has trained teams in Mali, Nicaragua, Haiti and Peru in small-scale solar panel manufacturing.
AIDG first learned about Enersa when our Executive Director, Peter Haas met Noel and Georges at the Inter-American Development Bank Haiti Business forum in Port-au-Prince last September.
“I was immediately impressed by [Noel] an engineer who taught himself the electrical engineering he was missing by using the free online engineering resources of MIT Opencourseware from Port Au Prince,” says Haas. “Also, after seeing the dramatic bootstrapping JR and Alex had done in starting their business, it was clear this team was different.”
My interaction with JR last week during a tour of the damaged Enersa facility reinforced that impression. Though the factory had sustained much damage — several collapsed interior and exterior walls, JR was optimistic about the company’s outlook. With the help of our emergency funding and some smart maneuvering, he expected to be back in production in a few short weeks. Enersa was lucky in that all their employees were safely accounted for and little of their inventory was damaged. Their latest shipment of solar cells had been safe in Miami at the time of the disaster.
In our chat, Noël stressed the importance of creating jobs in Haiti. He believes that for Haiti to flourish, enjoy sustained growth and ultimately transition into a developed nation, businesses need to create local employment opportunities. So rather than simply importing completed panels and lights, Enersa imports the basic building blocks and employs local youth for production and installation. In their solar streetlights for example, the small panel, LED lights and towers are all made in Haiti. The company’s 18 fully qualified solar technicians, all capable of installing solar streetlights and photovoltaic home systems, are from Port-au-Prince largest shantytown, Cité Soleil. An added benefit of local production, Noel added, is that their completed panels are also 25% cheaper. Double win.
Enersa’s client focus for the near future will be NGOs and private companies in Haiti who need reliable access to electricity and want to support a socially responsible local business.
To contact Enersa, please email enersahaiti {at] gmail (dot}com.
This project was the brainchild of Luc Castera, a Haitian born entrepreneur who also lives here in Arlington. He saw my videos on YouTube and thought my message would be an encouragement to those affected by the earthquake.
Luc has arranged for the video to be dubbed into Haitian Creole and shown as part of the Cinema Underthe Stars, a mobile outdoor movie theater that brings entertainment and inspiration to rural Haitian communities.
Our amputee video will be shown to tens of thousands of Haitians during 260 showings in 52 communities on Cinema Under the Stars’ current tour.
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