Week 3 Day 2

Crazy busy day today, although it didn't feel very productive. The sensor clusters are all assembled, which is great news, but once they were put together it was time to start testing them.

They look pretty good and fit very well into the smaller Otter Boxes so that is a success. You can see two generations of our sensor cluster lined up n the pics below. Things started to go a little bit wrong after this point, though.

So far we have a total of five sensor clusters completed and moved on to testing. And that is where we are having trouble. We spent the remainder of the morning getting our clusters, numbered 11-15, to connect to the coordinator and start transmitting data. We were at a complete loss until we discovered that the outlet the sensor was plugged in to seemed to matter. At first we thought it was a distance issue, but that seemed wrong since we were well with in the range of our radio. Mike ran down the hall plugging in clusters and the started working out there. I really don't know why it makes a difference because it wasn't as clear cut as wall outlets vs. surge protectors or something. One wall in the lab powered up the unit but wouldn't transmit. One power strip wouldn't. The hall outlets all seemed to be fine. Anyone who has some insight on this, please feel free to comment. 

Once we had everything transmitting properly we started trying to calibrate the sensors to make sure everything was set up. Temperature was a bit of an issue and we didn't have any good probeware to use for comparison. We will try that tomorrow.

The last hour before we left was spent reviewing all the work we have done and working on ideas for how to present our work this Friday during the midterm presentation. I think we are off to a really good start and  have done a lot of quality work... AND we know how to explain it!

So, overall, good stuff happened today. There is plenty of work left to do, however. 

"But, wait! What's this?" you might ask...

That is phase two, my friends. Details to come...