CAMDEN — Watershed School students in this year's engineering class made a presentation to the Camden Select Board Tuesday night, updating the board on the work they have been doing to facilitate data collection and remote monitoring of a variety of elements at the Seabright Dam on Mill Street.

The Seabright Dam Hydroelectric Facility was bought by Joe Sawyer in 1984, and has been generating electricity since 1987. An engineer and inventor, Sawyer nearly completely rebuilt the dam and turned it into a hydroelectric facility. Sawyer donated it to the town in 2007. According to a report from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection issued in 2010, the Seabright Dam produces 94 kilowatts and is an officially approved hydroelectric project under specifications laid out by the Federal Energy Regulation Commission.

The engineering class teacher, Peter Kalajian, approached Wastewater Superintendent Ross Parker, who is also in charge of the town's dams, looking for a class project.

"He thought we could use some additional instrumentation there at the dam, and we realized that yes, we could," said Parker Tuesday night. "And so there were two goals, one to monitor operations remotely, and two to give the public a means to log on and see what was happening in real time."

Ultimately, the town's website will include a link for town officials and the general public to access the data, he said. The students kept a blog about their work, with photos of the various equipment they engineered, as well as graphs plotting the data they collected.

Speaking for the class first was student Louisa Crane. She said the goals of the project included to instrument the dam with a variety of tools to be able to see and collect data in real time and to display the information on a website available to the town and the public.

"There was a need to get information to Ross to alert when there issues, and it's important for the public to have knowledge of what is happening at the dam," said Crane. "Having general knowledge about the dam's work can show the importance of alternative energy options."

Jesse Dunn told the select board that a variety of monitors were developed and installed, including depth sensors, one to show the water level above the dam and one to show the water level below the dam; RPM monitors, to show how fast the turbines were running; and temperature sensors, to help monitor proper operation.

"We put the date into a table and used Plotly to graph the data," said Dunn. "We then worked to make the data readable by people, not just machines, and the same with all of the other instruments and their data.

Jerin Brooks said another challenge of the project was that it was up to the students to go online to find the hardware and programming resources to make all the various elements of the data collection, graphing and interpretation work.

"The take-away was how we learned to teach ourselves, and to work independently, but then also to bring our independent work back to the group and work as a group," said Brooks.

Heather Dumond said the fourth component of the project was to take the individual codes and compile them into one big master code.

"We had to get them all to work together," said Dumond. "It was a learning opportunity for us, and we had to work out the kinks as well."

Dumond said the class anticipates that the live feed will be up online by the end of this week, with the Plotly graphs loaded and accessible by the public.

Select Board Member Leonard Lookner asked the group if the public data would include information about kilowatt hours generated, used and sold, and Kalajian said it could be in a future curriculum.

"Our task this year was to get the data there, next year, the new class can work on data mining and what the numbers mean and how they compare," said Kalajian.

Taking a further moment to recognize the students and their work following their presenation to the Select Board, Parker told them a bit about Sawyer.

"Seabright was his passion and hobby, and he did it all for fun. He built it all and through perseverance and passion he made it work," said Parker. "If Joe were here today, he would be very proud of you guys, of what you've done."

Editorial Director Holly S. Edwards can be reached at hollyedwards@penbaypilot.com or 706-6655.