In 2.00B “Solving Real Problems,” we are working towards helping out the Massachusetts based Food Project to build a new composter for one of their sites located in Dorchester, MA. For more information on the project and other project for 2.00B, visit the course website.

Background and description:

The Food Project is a nationally recognized youth development organization that manages 2 acres of urban and suburban farms in and around the city of Boston. The organization’s mission is to create a thoughtful and productive community of youth and adults from diverse backgrounds who work together to build a sustainable food system. On their four sites in Dorchester and Roxbury, they grow 15,000lbs of vegetables each year that are sold at a local low-income farmer’s market and donated to Rosie’s Place and Community Servings.

The Food Project needs to increase the amount of compost that they produce on their land, to improve the quality of their vegetables and minimize lead-contamination issues common in urban settings. The organization receives donations of compost from the city, but they do not receive enough, and this compost is not as high quality as the compost they make themselves.

The Food Project produces a lot of organic waste in the form of unusable vegetable matter (stalks, roots, cracked and damaged vegetables that cannot be sold or donated. They also pick up 2-4 trash barrels of food waste each week from Haley House Café, a neighborhood bakery, which they incorporate into the compost piles.

The Food Project would like help developing a composting system that would break down materials more quickly. A better composting system would save $1000/year and allow them to produce higher quality vegetables for the neighborhood shelters they serve.

Parameters:

• The site is not fenced. They don’t have a lot of problems with vandalism and leave things like crates and other materials out in the open, but whatever is built should be durable and safe.
• They don’t have an electrical power source on the land.
• Labor is another issue. During the summer months, they have a large number of volunteers working with them throughout the week. In other seasons, we have less help and turning the compost piles takes a lot of time! Any systems that could minimize this activity would be beneficial
• The system should not require a lot of space
• The system should minimize the smell of the composting material, as their neighbors have started to voice concerns about smells from the compost pile since they began picking up food waste from Haley House

An initial design for the composter:

Click an image to see a larger version!

I’m busy, too busy to think about anything in a linear fashion
sometimes, and I fall into a sort of whimsical scatterbrained frame of
mind that I feel defines my life here at MIT. Unfortunately with that
frame of mind come a lot of questions when I do finally get to sit back
and think clearly for a little while, and sometimes I get somewhat
uneasy with their answers.

What have I been doing with my time? Where does it all go? What can I
do to change things? I have no idea. It probably doesn’t help that I
cannot remember most of the things I have done even a few hours after
they’ve been done. What I do remember involves not sleeping because of
some crazy, inordinate amount of work. Everyone wants me to do
something for them more frequently than I’m willing to, and then I don’t
actually get done what I planned to, so what am I really doing?

I know I have some sort of plan somewhere, but I think I lost it. It’s
great to have a plan. I like plans. Usually the plan never goes as it
was intended to go and I think that’s the best part of a plan – planning
for things not to go as planned, planning for extra time and
interruptions in your plan, and planning for new plans that have the
same problems as the old ones. Unfortunately there’s never enough time
to follow all the plans through to completion. I had a plan to finish
my website a while ago, but now I am not really sure what the address
is. I think I’ll have to start over on that plan. (more…)

To get things onto your site:

• AFS Tutorial
• Secure FX

Useful Sites to look at for example code:

• Simple CSS example
• CSS 3-Column Layout because tables are not the way to go
• JavaScript Back-end site
• AJAX Back-end a variation of JavaScript

Tutorials:

• HTML everything
• Javascript everything
• Dojo AJAX intro

Tim had the great idea for a video that consisted of a continuous shot of me walking out of the dorm while constantly passing tim going the other direction, as if there were lots of Tim’s. So without further adeiu:

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It was a lot of fun to make the video. Thanks go to to Elvie who helped out even though she was really ‘tired’ at the time, and Petek and Justin for running objects around the dorm during the shot, holding elevators, and helping things in the background go smoothly.