Week 3 Day 1

The day started off with a little hands on work. Sharon brought us some plants and minnows so it was time to get our hands wet and slap together an aquarium. The tank was cleaned and filled on Friday so that part was ready to roll. I treated the water first to reduce the transfer shock the fish were likely to experience and to prime the tank with helpful bacteria and micro-nutrients. Then I dumped in plants and some minnows. All of the plants are locally sourced, including one very cool carnivorous plant called bladderwort. The fish we chose are minnows because they are pretty hardy and the can gulp from the surface if the need to (which is likely since we will eventually start messing with dissolved oxygen...). Once every thing was in the tank Joe and I did some decorating by anchoring the plants.

 Once that was knocked out it sort of ended our hands on portion of the day. The next thing that happened was a quick status update for Dr. Thompson on where our project stands and where it is going. She was encouraged by our progress and gave us the green light to start acquiring parts to build our sensor clusters and data sink. We also got the go-ahead for to start hammering out our table top stream model. I'm excited about that because it means lots more hands-on build time this week. We will also begin collecting data very soon if we actually get all the parts soon. Yay! One thing that we did discuss as a minor issue is that there is a a strong desire by the group running the project to include streaming video as part of the sensor cluster. Every one agrees that it is a great  idea and we would all like to see it happen but that is really almost a separate project in and of itself because of the processing demands of streaming video. It is likely that will be extended into a group assignment for next year and part of our teams responsibility is to do some planning for that contingency and to create a possible parts list to tackle that project so that there are parts on hand. (Here's hoping we are invited back next year to finish that out!)

Status update complete, the whole group dove deep into literature. Lori is building skeleton descriptors for the research we have pulled so far to include in the literature review section of our paper. Joe has accumulated several dead trees worth of material that he is stitching together to form our introduction. I am data mining the research we have already pulled to both widen our net and to try to get at some of the primary research that underpins a lot of these papers.