Week 6 Day 5

Well, today was the last day of our six week journey into the unknown. All of the groups presented their final results today and it was a lot of fun to see everyone's success. I'm already looking forward to next year! 

Here is the order we presented in.

Here are the group posters.

Here is my certificate for completing the course. (Just change the name and you know what the rest look like.)

Here is a link to our final paper.

Here is our final presentation. It is unedited, so, you know... If you hang in there you will also get to see the robotics presentation.

(coming soon...)

Week 6 Day 4

We are in the home stretch! All of the research is done. Our group poster is finished (great work Joe!). Our lab space is cleaned up and ready to be vacated. We have taken our group pictures and done our exit interviews. And Lori, Joe and I have all been working like demons to get the final paper completed. It is not 100% finished at this point but it is close. Before we submit we will export to word, clean up the formatting and then convert it to a pdf. If you want to see a final draft, though it can be accessed using the link below. So can our raw data.

Final Draft of Research Paper

Data From Dr. Hoeinghaus

Data Used in Paper

	pH	DO	Temperature
Correlation	0.615358	0.807081	0.755728
% Error	4.28714	16.4226	3.93644

Week 6 Day 3

Sorry ladies and gentleman, the posts are going to probably be a touch boring today and tomorrow. We are in the home stretch at this point and are pretty much just wrapping up the paper, posters, etc... Joe and I spent the whole day on the research paper and the TechFest stuff. Lori split her day between the paper and cleaning up the lab with our table top model and aquarium. Stay tuned, though! The paper will likely be posted tomorrow!

The WSN explained...

Our grad student, Yixing Gu, sat us down today and gave us a summary report of exactly how the wireless sensor network is organized and what programs he wrote to control it.

Midterm Presentation

This can be found in Week 3 Day 5 but I have been told there was a problem viewing it. I believe that has been fixed, but I am posting the video again just to be sure. Our final presentation is two days from now!

Week 6 Day 2

Sorry for the late post. Not a whole lot to report today. We went out to the field and retrieved the sensor cluster and the data. We should receive the data from the sonde soon. Once we have that we will begin crunching numbers and seeing how successful our sensor cluster really is.

In the afternoon we got a tour of EESAT with Dr. Thompson to show us the facility and the space that would be available to us during TechFest. We also discovered that we were mistaken on what we were supposed to produce for TechFest so what I did won't work. On the plus side, it is a good intro project for my APES kids. On the minus side, I need to make a new activity first thing in the morning.

Speaking of TechFest... Here is one of the cool projects the kids can play with.

Week 6 Day 1

Today was another field day for use. We went out and met Dr. Hoenghaus and Luke at the Water Treatment Facility to set up our WSN and start logging data. We got our sensor cluster anchored and set up quickly.

We did take a second to calibrate the DO sensor, but it was pretty simple.

It took a little bit longer to get the YSI Sonde calibrated and set up. This time we used a more high end model that has a longer battery life and can stay in the field longer. It also has more ports for probes. This one is equipped with a pH, DO and temperature probe but also includes a turbidity probe.

The probe that Dr. Hoeinghaus is pointing at here is the Turbidity probe. The rollers are sponges that clean the probe so nothing gets caked on to the sensor. Once it was calibrated when dropped everything in the water together so we would have data that we could compare.

The original plan was to just log two hours of data and then bail. Luke and Dr Hoeinghaus planned on being at the facility all day today and tomorrow, though, and Yixing was ok leaving his computer over night so we made an executive decision in the field and decided to let the probes run until the morning. That is exciting because it increases the likelihood of getting changes in DO and pH since the temperature will almost certainly change. Since we are leaving things in the field we needed to set up the laptop somewhere protected. Putting it in the shed seemed like the best option but we were concerned about the signal. Joe set up an antennae on the wall of the shed with the lead heading through a small hole in the wall and Yixing set up his laptop inside.

The other big piece of news was that the camera is up and running, We rigged it up on a cross bar and accessed the signal using Yixing laptop and let Luke and Dr. H play. They were very excited by the possibilities.

Back on campus we had several more successes. I completed the activity we are going to use at TechFest and got approval from Joe and Lori while Joe made some great progress with the paper. Yixing also produced schematics for our circuit that we can include in our paper.

DO Circuit

Temp Circuit

pH Circuit

Power Circuit

Complete Circuit

That's not all, though. Yixing also created a website that automatically translates the data tables produced by the data sink into a visual format.

Pretty exciting stuff! Once we get the data from the sondes and the sensor cluster we can start checking to see how accurate our system is. We will keep you posted. If you are interested in an update on the fish in the artificial stream... sadly, we are down to 11. We had a couple of floaters this morning and most of the smaller fish are gone.

Week 5 Day 5

We met this morning with a professor and some grad students from UAEM in Toluca, Mexico. Pretty interesting conversation. Apparently all of the major universities in Mexico have a network of high schools that they are associated with. They are not exactly feeder schools, but there is definitely a link. Also, the north and central districts of Mexico are going paperless and moving to iPad-based learning. I would be interested to see how they will implement that program since that definitely won't be cheap. One thing that was a little surprising was how rigid the education system in Mexico seem to be. There is no possibility of earning duel credit during high school. In fact, if you are in a bachelors program you can not do anything to earn credit towards a masters. If your degree plan is supposed to take 4 years and your finish in three... you have a year to cool your heals before you get your degree and can move up to a masters. The group that came here was primarily working in the social sciences but there was a fair bit of discussion about our aquatics project because there is a big push in Toluca right now around water quality.

That absorbed pretty much the entire morning. When we came back we all got to work starting the wrap up for this project. We discussed the goals of our paper over lunch and revised our intent a little bit. Yixin is working up the schematics for our circuits so that others could replicate our work. Joe completed our poster and it looks great! (Notice the QR code? Pretty nifty, right? It was Lori's idea.) 

On the hardware front, Yixin acquired four of the five antennae we need to install on the boxes for the WSN. One thing we noticed was that the signal strength through the Otter Boxes was extremely degraded. To eliminate that problem we are installing external antennae which should boost our range.

The fish are still doing their thing. To prove some of them are alive I snapped some picks of fish playing in the tanks and riffles.

In other news, the Loftek camera is up and running and can be controlled via cell phone. Sadly, the response time isn't great and the resolution is not good enough to make out the small fish against the gravel background. The concept is solid, though, and it is a promising start for the project next year.