Wait, no. That is wrong. Let me start again.
Hi every one! I'm excited to be back at UNT working with the Research Experience for Teachers program. I am continuing the stream monitoring program this year, but I have a new team and we have a new goal this year! So, lets meet the team...
Zac Bunn
Second Year in the Program
Team Lead
Head Tinkerer
Blogger-in-Chief
Hi! I'm Zac. I am a teacher at METSA, an academy that is part of R.L. Turner. This is my second year as a member of the Research Experience for Teachers through UNT and I am getting to continue the project I worked on last year to make it more functional and useful in the real world. I will wear a couple of hats this year. Since I am a returning RETter I get to be a team lead, which is pretty cool. I will also be responsible for most of the hardware production and tinkering. And... you will get to hear from me on the blog each day since I will be in charge of that again this year. So, typos, etc... all my fault. Don't blame the rest of the team.
Mike McEver
First Year in the Program
General Go-getter
Boomer Sooner! I'm Mike and I am a Chemistry teacher at Hebron High School. This is my first summer here at UNT doing RET. I am extremely excited about the project we are working on this summer. My main task will be to organize the research and put together the presentation.
Deliah Johnson-Seastrunk
First Year in the Program
Master Lesson Planner
I am Deliah! Currently, I am a Science teacher at Navo Middle School in Denton. This is my first year as a participant in the UNT RET program. I am really excited about being able to learn about water monitoring and control sensors. I will be the one helping to gather data and create the lesson plan so that this project can be modified and implemented for our students that are in secondary science classrooms.
Update on what we are doing:
We will be using the same sensor cluster we developed last year but we will be building four more to add to the network. (yay for hand spooling transformers!!!) We will be shooting to include the ability to stream video along with the data and we might even try to add in some control systems to the clusters. We will explore ways to control temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen in artificial stream systems.
Today was your basic intro day. There were introductions, a powerpoint or two and some paperwork we needed to do. In the afternoon we broke out into our team groups and met with our mentors to discuss what we were doing with our project this year. After our team meeting Mike and Deliah jumped right in to some basic coding on the Arduino and made the Hello World Morse code program my blog followers will be familiar with. Mike really enjoyed it so he and Yixing (Yes, he is back. I love this guy...) started messing with LEDs. Once they got rolling on that Deliah jumped in as well. Tomorrow we will work on stripping down the code from last year to just pull out the temperature data. We will use that to fine tune are network communications later in the week.
Between the team meeting and the new guys learning the ins and outs of Processing I talked to Yixing about the hardware. I was reunited with our hardware from last year and that was a bitter sweet moment. I was then introduced to the updated 2.0 model that Yixing worked out. It uses a PCB he printed this morning. I will be happily soldering away later this week using his model to pound out several more copies of the new sensor cluster. With the much smaller footprint I think it might be even easier to create and deploy larger network clusters. It won't matter so much here, but if the location of our research site required us to ship our equipment...
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