General • Need ideas for pesticide drift detector.

Greetings,

I live in an agricultural zone, and a neighbor has been raising the alarm about pesticide drift into adjacent neigborhoods, especially during our frequent coastal fog days. The only reliable way for the community to test for these toxins so far has been to go to the doctor for blood tests. Calls to the Agricultural commissioner about drift and poisonings have him unconvinced. He told my acquaintance from the neighborhood that only one person has repirted being poisoned, so it's not an issue.

Said acquaintance was asking about the possibility of developing low-cost real-time drift detectors for the edges of farm fields. I thought perhaps a particle detector of some sort, calibrated for certain chemical(s) attached to a RPi Pico might work.

We are mostly trying to detect organophosphates, carbamates, and pyrethroids.

Here is an example study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6469994/

I suppose one difficult part is finding a suitable sensor, but I have no idea.

I am brain-storming here.

thanks

Statistics: Posted by breaker — Wed Sep 18, 2024 9:26 pm

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