Week 2 Day 4

Crazy busy day! Spoiler Alert: We got our base sensor clusters done! Ok, so back to the start. We spent most of Wednesday disassembling our test clusters. Today we were focused on getting everything properly attached to our printed circuit boards (PCB) which took some doing.

 Think of it as playing a game that is half putting together a complicated puzzle with tiny pieces and half Operation but with out the convenient buzzer to let you know you screwed something up.We managed to get everything tacked down on the boards in the morning... and then spent the rest of the afternoon trouble shooting why they things weren't working. I will spare you the details because it was something different in each case but it tended to revolve around either messing up the polarity of a component or shorting a connection with solder that bled over with out you noticing. After we cleaned that up we managed to get both stamps on each board to light up.

This was a major success but we weren't done yet. We plugged them all in and ran down the hall to the other lab to check our receiver unit. Sure enough, there were our data strings separated by sensor number just like we hoped! It was a good day.

We aren't done yet, though. What we have done so far is make a set of four sensor clusters that are identical in function to what we designed last year and networked them together. That is great, but not the final goal. Next we are going to work on creating a control system to manipulate water level based on feedback from an ultrasonic sensor and/or alarms based on temperature, pH and DO readings. The basic idea is that if water level is too low add water. If water level is too high bleed of water. If pH, DO or temperature alarms go off then you would flush part of the tank by bleeding off and adding water at the same time. We will keep you posted on how that works out.

Week 1 Day 3

Today we did not have a lot of obvious forward movement on the project but the team did make a lot of progress with foundation skills. We also had a pretty productive team meeting. The whole day was devoted to learning the Arduino. The start of the day was focused on just a basic intro to Arduino. We watched the Ted Talk and Nick introduced us to a robot that he slapped together before he knew what he was doing. After our first break we took a look at several sketches and broke down the code step by step to learn the syntax. After that... Lunch!

When we got back from lunch we started out with our team meeting. We discussed our plan for the week with Dr. Fu and Yixing. Tomorrow we will meet in the morning for a soldering workshop. After that we will put together a simple temperature probe and practice setting it up for wireless communication. Once we have that down we will move on to the other probes until we can make them all work as expected. After that we will build the sensor clusters and start on the nightmare of cleaning up last years code. After those two took off we discussed what control system we wanted to include in our project. We decided to do a basic water level monitor for our artificial stream system.

The afternoon was devoted to actually building stuff with the Arduino and the breadboards. We started out on the tail end of our team meeting. Mike took his traveling light program from yesterday and flipped it so that the traveler was the negative value instead of the positive. Then he and Deliah made a model traffic light.

After our play time was over we went back to the seminar room and did some hands on practice with simple circuits. The first thing they built was a potentiometer switch that let you toggle between a red and green LED. The next was more complicated. They assembled a keypad and speaker. When they entered the correct code the speaker played a tone for 5 seconds. There was a bit of an issue since the orientation of the keyboard actually did matter on the breadboard and most people put it in backwards on the first try. The point of these two circuits was to show how much simpler it was to use a microprocessor rather than trying to do the entire process with ICs. 

Week 1 Day 1

So, Lonestar, we meet again. For the first time, for the last time...

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...

For more information on the program check here.