Week 3 Day 5

Today was presentation day! Behold!!!

Here are the slides.

After the presentation we spent the afternoon in an epic brainstorming session and we ended up finishing up our tech fest idea. I think it is a good one and I anticipate it being a much larger success than what we tried last year.

Week 3 Day 4

This morning we started out meeting in the classroom over at Discovery Park to start finalizing our presentation. We put together our power point and made it all pretty. Not hard for three teachers... we do i all the time. In the afternoon we ducked back over to EESAT to retrieve our sensors and clean the place up so you would never even know we were there. After that mission was accomplished we returned to Discovery Park and handed over the laptop to Yixing so that he could extract our data and put it into pretty graphs. The good news is that all of our probes agreed on what happened in the tank over the last twenty four hours and had relatively stable readings (the DO data from cluster 15 was a little dirty but, hey, that's field work...)

So that is confirmation that our clusters seem to be doing what they are supposed to. Stage two is hauling this stuff out to the water research facility and leaving it out there over night to see if we can produce the same kinds of diel curves we generated last year.

After we debriefed the data from the probes we went through the presentation as a group and made some quick edits. After that we ran through everything once to make sure we were all on the same page concerning how tomorrow should look then we called it a day.

Week 3 Day 3

We started out the day in Discovery Park completing the sensor tests and doing one last calibration of the pH and DO. We tried tinkering with the temperature sensor a little bit but the system is pretty "black box" so we ended up just leaving it alone.

Having finally beat the sensors into submission...errrr... completing calibration, we boxed everything up and took a trip over to EESAT. We set up in the wet lab and got all of our probes connected and in the water.

Once we had that set up we got the laptop booted up, connected the coordinator and started running our labview program to collect the data. We monitored it for about a half hour to make sure everything was ticking along smoothly.

So, progress! We are actually doing some tests now instead of just tinkering. That is good news. We spent what was left of the day discussing the presentation for Friday and who would be talking about what.

For your viewing pleasure...

The mighty Yixing Gu dropping some science on ya...

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...

Week 3 Day 1

Monday was a field trip day! The whole group got together at EESAT and loaded up  in vans to go explore the Greenbelt Corridor of Ray Roberts State Park. There has been a sensor array set up out there for the last couple of years that we were interested in seeing. It is similar to the wireless sensor network we are designing in principal, though the specifics are markedly different. The most obvious difference is that these sensors are monitoring soil moisture and other land based readings whereas we are aquatic. Another major difference is that the sensors here use a Crossbow radio rather than XBee. Aside from the sensor array it was also a pleasant nature walk.

Week 2 Day 5

Today we sat in a computer lab and worked on lesson plans. All day. Not my favorite. Deliah was working on an over all lesson plan for middle school. Mike was doing the same but modifying it for high school. I slapped together a power point for them to include and have been developing a lab activity. *sigh*

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!