From ‘Blink’ to BLE
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This week I am getting acquainted with Arduino. I started with this basic guide – ‘install software, plug in board, make it do a thing with a sketch in Arduino. I played around with some other sketches and basic searches. When I had success with that I moved on to  connecting the BLE shield to the arduino uno and getting it to work. I followed these simple instructions to setting up the RedBear Labs libraries and getting the shield to talk to the stock android tablet available through the app store.

Screenshot_2015-11-02-15-27-37Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 3.41.57 PM

Next I will be trying to get the IR light sensor to work with the BLE shield. I will need to decide sampling frequency as well as how to transport data packets to ‘Field Day’.

 

 

 

 

Week of November 1, 2015
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I accomplished very little last week on this project (homecoming, dedication) other than planting some fundraising seeds with some potential donors over the weekend. Over the next week I plan to:

  1. Begin the conversation about if, and if so how, the field science project can become a regular Wilderness Program offering.
  2. Process Oli’s most recent message and prepare a reply.
  3. Develop initial materials for A/D to use with potential donors; meet with SallyS and AvisS.
  4. Work on Field Day.

Squirrels and the Internet
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This week Nic and I spent time brainstorming and testing the thermal camera. We were able to see squirrels from approximately 15 meters away. Squirrels have a body temperature of about 36-38 degrees C and the arctic terns have a body temperature of just over 40 degrees C. The terns are a little bit smaller but being able to detect the squirrels is a great indication of what our success with the camera could look like. We are still trying to figure out the best way to test aerially. We could use water bottles with water, heated to the correct temperature. Right now however, we need to figure out if this is going to be the best technology to use, because the set-up might prove to be a little difficult. First we would need to mount the camera with Sugru (not very difficult).  However figuring out how to make the camera take the photo or live feed a stream might be difficult. It looks like right now our options are either to try and open the camera and wire something into it that could stream the feed (not sure if this is possible), or we can start looking at other technology. One option that Ben and I discussed early on in the year is Flir One Thermal Vision. However the website for the technology is very poor so finding information has proved difficult, however it is basically an attachment to a smartphone that displays thermal image.

Latitude and longitude for the the yellow point on the map below for the internet:

65°17’39.06″N

13°54’30.42″W

Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 3.29.12 PM

Cleaning Up
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I’ve continued working on my master table.I’ve been doing two things to the data,cleaning up the format it’s in,and substituting dummy values for those records where we don’t have values.I’ve also been doing a reasonableness check with the data by comparing our calendars and where the calendars said we were to the data we have.This has let me know what data we can safely get rid of,like the couple of testing streams we have from around hostels.

I’m almost done with cleaning up and should be able to just put all of my nice clean data (all in one format!!) into the fieldscience db.

Android Architecture
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Nic, Charlie and I have been struggling with finding a time to meet so we can talk about the Field Day android application. We were able to briefly talk about it on Saturday morning, and decided some things about the architecture of the application.

Currently, the main screen of our application shows all 8 “skins” (Earth, Ambiance, Gas, Water, Settings, About, Notepad, and Protocols). We’ve decided that we want the main screen to have just 4 skins (Settings, ‘Take a Sample’, ‘Lab Notebook’, and About). The Take and Sample and Lab Notebook skins, once clicked, will open up into a variety of options underneath. All of the types of sample skins from before (Earth, Ambiance, Gas, and Water) will now move underneath ‘Take a Sample’ skin. Under ‘Lab Notebook’ we are going to move Protocols, Notepad, Checklist and whatever else we decide.

Having a separate page for just sampling will make using fragments a lot easier. I’ve started on making icons for the new skins we decided on, and will implement those in the code as soon as they are ready.

Hopefully today we will be able to talk and get more work done in the meeting.

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