Week 9 has come and gone and there's plenty of work to be done. I wrote the majority of the first draft of my paper this week. I'm hoping to have this draft revised soon so that I can prepare to turn in everything at the conclusion of my REU. Our project has made a little project this week. We recently found a sensor that we think will allow us to take two different kinds of measurements. This led to us reconsidering our design, if we could use this sensor we wouldn't have any need for our current temperature sensor. My colleague scouted out a few different parts we would need to build our first real prototype. We are pretty sure we will be using cellular signals to transmit our data and have decide we will also want to add a barometric pressure sensor to our design as well. It seems like we are getting closer and closer to having a prototype to test and while it may not be complete before I leave for the summer, its still very exciting. Check out the illustration bellow to get an idea of what we are trying to build.
Week 8 has come to an end, man time really does fly. This past week was a bit slow, me and my colleagues decided to get together to come up with a list of priorities to keep us busy these next two weeks. We hope to finalize a design and have a prototype built before my 10 weeks are up but this may not be realistic, it depends on how quickly we can order parts and get them here. So far throughout this whole experience the tricky thing has been figuring out what we want to use. Originally we worked with the temperature sensor but had no real solution for depth sensing that was cost effective. Now we believe we may have found a sensor that will take care of both our temperature and depth measurements. If we decide to use this sensor for these measurements then all we will need to do is come up with a solution for the water proof enclosure and we will be close to having a functional prototype that we could start testing. With two weeks left it will be interesting to see what more we can get done.
This week was a bit of a short one, by Thursday much of the building was empty in preparation of the holiday. All of our lab people showed up Thursday but most of us took Friday off. Anyway, on Wednesday of this week we had the opportunity to take a little field trip out to a few different sections of the Sipsey river that we hope to deploy our devices to. We unfortunately didn't have much equipment to bring out with us to test, the main thing holding us back in that regard is the lack of a solution for water proofing, and the fact that we have yet to finalize how our communications will work. We were able to test the availability of cellular networking at the sites and were pleasantly surprised to find that we will have more access to cellular communication than we previously thought. This will hopefully allow us to transmit our data along the river areas where cellular communication is strong in order to get it out of the river and into a database. We have been flirting with the idea of sending the data in text messages. This works well in theory since currently the sensor that I have put together writes the data it collects into simple text files on an SD card. Eventually I envision a system in which we have the sensors collect data, save it to an SD card for safe keeping and then immediately transmit it through our network and return to sleep mode. This way we will be able to update our data in real time but also save that data in case there is some sort of complication.
Next week I am hoping to finally do some tests on the power consumption of the sensor I have put together, comparing its normal consumption to that consumption when it utilizes sleep mode and the other optimizations I've made. Additionally there's more work that needs to be done with the wireless communication, waterproofing, and of course dept sensing. Not all of this will get done within the next few weeks but hopefully we can at least make a good amount of progress on the wireless communication. I've also got a paper I need to start writing. Lots of work to do. Until next week! Not a whole lot to report this week. I already posted about my major accomplishment this week which was hooking up the sensors to the arduino mini wireless. Now that we've gotten that done we can focus on communication and how we are going to transmit our data, waterproofing the device, and deciding what batteries we want to use and how we can optimize our use of power. So those are just a few things to think about.
Next week we are vising one of the sites where we hope to collect data which will be very exciting. I can't wait! Until next week! Up until this point I've been working exclusively with the arduino uno. The uno is pretty simple to work with and was good for testing our sensors and getting acquainted with the arduino eco system but it isn't what we are going to be using out at the sites. Instead we want to use the Mini wireless arduinos. They are smaller, lower power, and have wireless communication (probably why they are called mini wireless huh). They are just going to be a better fit for the project, so of course this meant at some point I was going to have to take everything I did to the uno and transfer it to the wireless. I had been putting it off for a while but wiring everything up didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. I got everything working today, as opposed to the several days it took when I was first learning how to use the uno. Guess I'm getting the hang of it. I still have some code to fix up so that it will work with the mini but that shouldn't take very long at all. Yay progress! check it out bellow:
I know I haven't posted in a while but that's because It's been a busy week and the river bed project team has been hard at work. My colleagues have been working hard on the radios that we are hoping to use for data transmission while I've been working on the arduino, temperature sensor, and SD card reader.
We got to meet with the biology professor we are working with this week and got a better idea of what she was trying to do. We made plans to go and check out one of the sites where we will be collecting data on July 1st. I'm very excited! While the professor was here we showed off what we had, I demoed my current working prototype(I combined the SD card reader with the thermometer we can finally log data!), my colleagues showed off the radios, which weren't quite ready yet. Now I've got to work on taking the prototype that I have and transitioning it from running off the computers power source to running off of a battery. Because we will be running off of a battery we will have to factor in power consumption. We want our device to be low power and not require frequent battery changes. In order to do this we may need to build our own low power arduino on a breadboard, additionally we will also need to incorporate some sort of sleep mode so that not as much power is used when data isn't being recorded. To top it all off we are going to need to somehow get some water proof housing for this thing. So there's a lot of work still to be done. Hopefully we can have some sort of prototype that we can bring with us for our trip on the 1st. Wish me luck, Until next week. After a weeks worth of work I'm proud to announce that I got the Arduino to correctly hook up to the SD card reader. What was the issue you might ask? Well it was simple really, I had a single wire connected incorrectly which I believe was keeping the SD card reader from getting any power. Originally I thought the issue was the the Arduino wasn't connected to the correct chip select pin but it turns out that wasn't the case. It's an odd combination of joy and frustration that you feel when a solution was so simple and right under your nose. Oh well on to the next part. This was what I had before I fixed the issue. And here is after, it really is as simple as it looks. Can't believe it was right under my nose.
I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Jeff Gray about a week ago. He is a professor here at the University of Alabama who in working towards getting better computer science education to public schools nation wide. He asked me and the other students working in the lab if he could interview us about our experiences in computer science. It supposed to serve as a motivator to try and get others interested in computer science. You can read more about Dr. Gray here. And check out my interview too, try to ignore all the funny faces and weird hand gestures I make. One of my colleagues gave me a little assignment to help me get more familiar with Arduino and Micro-controllers in general. I've made quite a bit of progress today but I'm not quite ready to put my solution yet. But just in case you were wondering what I'm working on ill post the assignment here so you can check it out. Think you know a solution?
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AuthorThis blog is authored by me, Omar White. Learn more about me here Archives
September 2015
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