This time round we had a good chunk of data to present at the Geological Society of America conference, and I think that moved the project into something that generated real interest in the academic community. We still had allot of the old guard commenting that grant writing would always be a better use of their time than hardware development (and for them that's probably true...) But there was allot of interest from younger researchers, and I think that's really where creative new approaches to environmental monitoring will be developed with open source hardware.