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.
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.