There has been a while since I posted about hardware. Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Not so long ago, I watched a video about setting up a post-apocalypse backpack and I loved it. So it reminded me of a university project I had. You see I had this very cool teacher, a networks professor, who loves videogames and roleplaying. He would make up a story for the course-projects in which the students were the last hope of humanity engineering and you have to hack the evil machines fallen drones and other items for building a post-apocalypse network and hack the enemy. (I know I know, you are so jealous about my networks class) I already coursed that long ago but I thought “hey why not writing about an enhanced version, an open hardware full gear”?

Okay okay, let’s get on it. We’ve thought of so many scenarios in which humans get slaved by machines due to our uncontrollable will for creating a super-intelligent AI that could potentially kill us all. That might be but we are so capable of fuck our world pretty much, so First thing that came to my mind was “pollution”. I even considered myself (like, in the real world) to start wearing some kind of mask in the mornings as the city I work in almost took back an air-pollution prevention program. And even tho they didn’t, the pollution level rate is officially tagged as “Moderate”. In the post-apocalypse scenario, we are imagining then, the air is pretty fucked up already. So the first project:

1. Enhanced anti-pollution mask

I found this article about best antipollution masks of this year with reviews (which got me pretty preoccupied btw) and I thought we need something that make it easy for us to add some hardware on it, that could be reusable (so, washable) and ended choosing two: Vogmask Chakra VMCV Medium (reusable, not exchangeable filters, easy to sew on it, 3 to 4 months of use, a bit expensive) and Military Grade N99 Washable Respirator (reusable, using exchangeable filters, easy to sew on it, longer use, cheaper than the other). Now, let’s get to the hardware.
e
My choice is arduino Nano because I’m in love with it in general and I use it for literally everything, there’s also this version with Bluetooth, that I haven’t tried yet but I’d love to. Other nice choices also include Arduino pro mini (this last one only supports 3.3V) or, if you feel adventurous, Arduino Beatle that I once tried due to the friends from DFRobot provided me with a free sample for writing for them; it works on 5V and it’s soo tiny and cute.
What are we going to attach to this? First of all an air quality sensor. I used to had this heavy air quality sensor, but there’s also a tiny one suitable for Arduino and easy to attach to our mask. Next, what can we do with our sensor? I found this mini fan made for RPI but as it only needs 5V supply and GND pins, I would go for it, attached close to the respirator can be activated if the pollution is high in order to clean a bit the air around the respirator. If we are feeling inspired, we can even attach this GPS module which btw has an amazing library for Arduino here, and storage information about high-pollution locations in a Micro Sd for later upload to your device and think of different paths for the next time.

2. Plant caring kit

What? Did you expect to go to Lidl or Tesco on the post-apocalypse? You need to take care of your own veggies. You will want to take care of the temperature and soil humidity. I’m already trying to create a repo for this, as it’s a cute project even in the present days. I got this soil sensor and we can use our classic temperature basic sensor or a fancy temperature/humidity/pressure/air quality module. I’m using nano but again this project could be good with Arduino UNO or similar, as it doesn’t need to be tiny. Oh! And where should we see the results? Welp we have this monochrome dislay for Arduino or this epaper display, too. You might want to automate the watering, for that you might want to add a pump in your project.

Happy planting!

3. Crazy monitoring

Oh welp, we are in danger, we get it. But if you want your post-apocalypse friends and neighbours to think you are the craziest survivor, take a look at this list:

• Adafruit Geiger Counter Kit - Radiation Sensor and its cute case. I really love Adafruit, like… why.

• IoT starter kit Particle Photon for protecting and monitoring your place like the crazy survivor you are. But probably the internet is fucked up too, so in this case nope.

• Pocket Osciloscope because you don’t know when you will need it. Post-apocalypse is wild, okay?

• An Arduino mobile robot kit that you might want to attach a RPI with a cam for image processing using OpenCV. I don’t know, for searching intruders or serve as a companion as everyone will isolate you because you are clearly crazy. Or are you??

Communication

In case you have friends and family you want to keep in touch. For this, you can create a radio station using the RPI or even though it’s not as maker-thingy as the rest of the list you can use this Baofeng frequency-programmable mini radio transmitter-receiver.

I encourage you to share your crazy post-apocalypse hardware ideas!