Android Architecture

by Kristin Muterspaw on 2015-11-02 with No Comments

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.

Spectra and Soil

by Tara Urner on 2015-10-12 with No Comments

This week I met with Mike Deibel regarding soil fertility measurements. One of the primary accepted ways to measure soil fertility is the combustion method. We don’t want to do that. Other alternatives are spectroscopy of the soil directly (requires infrared electromagnetic range) or of a soil solution after a reaction (can be done in the visible light range, but requires reagents and possibly a flow-injection system). For the munsell color test, a visible-range spectrometer that uses fiber optic cables to transmit signal could be used.

NIR spec focuses on the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Building a NIR spectrometer is tricky because a lot of things absorb infrared wavelengths and because I would have to build some sort of detector that scans through individual wavelengths very precisely. This isn’t impossible, but it isn’t trivial – so I’m still looking into it. There are a large number of DIY spectrophotometers projects out there but few of them dip very far into the IR range, precisely because it is so difficult.

There is a nice DIY solution for flow-injection analysis (a stream of reagent is merged with a stream of sample and the mixture is analyzed). [3D printed syringe pump] [Nitrate quantification]

For the munsell color test, things are a lot simpler because we only need to deal with the visible light range. Reverse-engineering a visible light spectrometer like this one is not at all an unreasonable thing to do.

The Bean arrives!

by Kristin Muterspaw on 2015-10-12 with No Comments

Last week, the bean arrived! We got four beans in the mail, which came with a ‘Maker Kit.’ The Maker Kit really just contained some headers, a buzzer, and your basic accessories. I was able to connect to all four of the Beans through my computer and my phone! It’s pretty cool that you can connect and upload code right from your phone. The ‘Bean Loader’ computer application integrates with Arduino really well. You write the code in the Arduino IDE, and just send it to the Bean through the Bean Loader. I followed this guide OSX Starting Guide to get started using the bean with my laptop. This is the guide I followed for iOS Guide for setting it up on my iPhone.

Unlike most Arduino board, the Bean has no headers already soldered in. We don’t want to solder right away. We still need to make a prototype and test that it works. So, what I did was set up a little prototyping configuration using a breadboard and some wires. You can see it below — it’s a light sensor. The LED on the Bean gets brighter as it detects more light and dimmer as it detects less light. I was able to get this running with the Bean Example Projects page.

I’ve been looking through different websites like MakerShed, SparkFun, and Adafruit for different ambiance type sensors. There are many options to choose from, that have a wide range in prices. What sensors to get, we should probably decide as a group. Also, the Bean has a built-in Temperature sensor that we need to test, and perhaps we could cross that off the list of sensors to buy.

Database design tools

by Deeksha Srinath on 2015-09-21 with No Comments

I spent this past week learning about what options exist as far as small scale database diagram tools exist.
I found a lot of tools that are standalone desktop applications,but once I decided that we needed a design tool that was a browser based application,the search was narrowed down quite a bit.I think being able to collaboratively look at the current designs lends itself to the kind of work we’re trying to do,so this is the final list of what I’ve narrowed the search down to:

I’m partial to using Vertabelo at this point,having played around with it for a while.I really like the interface and it’s pretty intuitive.It’s also free as long as the project is small,and we definitely come under what Vertabelo identifies as such.

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