The low point of my day…
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As near as I can tell from a quick look at the data collected by Field Day and Grace (our prototype ambiance platform) and the Yocto altimeter (based on the same MPL3115A2 chip that we use) this was the low point of my day yesterday at about 201m:

IMAG0439

I started Field Day and the Yocto around Portland, Indiana and then drove home and walked down to the creek where this picture was taken. The highest point in Indiana is about half-way between Portland and where we live in Boston. The creek bed is the limestone floor of the ocean that covered this part of the US about 350mya. Neither device was calibrated, and we won’t know for sure how the track looks until Craig maps the data, but things are looking good.

 

In other news Nic has collected data from the LiDAR in the lab as it moved slowly over an object on the floor. We’re collecting theta, distance tuples at set intervals (1cm) along the track, I think we can visualize these as stacked wind roses as a first-order approach to “seeing” what it found. Matplotlib to the rescue!

Our credit card looks like one of Dali’s clocks…
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Kristin booked our tickets (yes!), and I ordered high precision barometric pressure sensors (to be used for altimeters), Adafruit Feathers to use as the micro-controllers for the ambiance/orienteering and soil (field and bench) platforms. This model has BLE and a battery charging circuit. I built a simple rig for the NIR sensor and scissor table, this is one of the bench soil platforms.

The next thing I would like to wrestle is reconciling the data stream that comes through the sensors into the database. Given that we’ll be collecting readings from multiple sensor platforms at each spot we need a way to aggregate those. This mirrors what happens with 911 incident data, in that case it’s the call number that binds all the different responses (fire, EMS, etc.) to an incident together.

Lots to do, 58 days to do it in…

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.

What has changed?! $FIELDSCIENCE & YoctoLib
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In our $FIELDSCIENCE Android application we use a library from Yoctopuce.com called YoctoLib which works with hardware purchased from them. We use Yoctopuce hardware in our Ambiance platform, and in the Ambiance skin in the app.

This library and code was working — recognizes the USB Yoctopuce devices that are plugged into the device and reading sensor data from them — the last time I used it (~July). Since then, something has gone wrong. The application will no longer read data from the sensors plugged in. I finally got it to at least recognize the device, but no data is being read. I suspect that this happened because of the move to Android Studio. Android Studio must have internally changed the way it uses APIs, which is what I am trying to figure out.

This further pushes me to believe that switching to Bluetooth to use the Yocto devices is necessary. Since the Yocto devices have to plug in via USB, each time I need to test the code, I have to upload the code to the Android device and then unplug the device from the computer so I can plug in the Yocto devices. This makes it difficult for debugging. If the device is plugged into the computer, Android Studio will constantly log messages from any application in real-time to the screen. Android keeps log messages even if the device is unplugged, and will load them once the device is plugged back in, but it’s all the messages (which is A LOT) from the test at once. It’s hard to go back through and figure out where something went wrong.