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!
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!