Week 4 Day 2

This morning we started out getting some things organized for our paper and pounding out some research. After that we went to two seminars. One was on robotic vision and that was not especially applicable to what we were working on. The first one, though, was explaining how you can use a UAV quadcopter as a tool in environmental surveys and research. Super cool. Also, if it wasn't for the FAA laws banning UAVs from commercial transactions this thing would make an awesome taco-copter.

I totally want one. After that we ran water through our artificial stream until it ran clear and then drained it as best we could. Then I situated the plants into the gravel and we filled it again. We treated the water and let it run for fifteen minutes. Once that was done Lori caught 15 fish and put them into tank one and then another 15 for tank 4. The thought there was we could see if the traveled upstream from tank 4 and see if they went down stream from tank one.

At first it didn't look like they were going to move much. We had one wash down the riffle from tank 1 to tank 2 right away and then another about a minute after. Then... nothing. They all went as deep as they could in their tank and stayed put. After a couple of hours, though, they started migrating. They will stay in one tank for a while and then one will get brave and head into a riffle. As soon as one does it four or five others will follow.

Once the artificial stream was in good shape we took another look at the circuit that Yixin had been perfecting. It now works exactly the way we want it to but it has gotten much more complex.

We are going to have to make four more of these bad boys so I sat down with Yixin and we started putting together the power controller for the sensor clusters. This is a lot more complicated then I expected and started out with Yixin making me wind coil for our DC transformers. Each transformer has two coils. The inner coil is wound 50 times with copper wire and the outer coil has 102. I made two of those today. I still have six more to go. After those were done we started laying out the circuit. Once I got a power controller set up completely on one of the boards we flipped it and Yixin told me to start soldering. I had a mild panic attack. Jennifer noticed and we started a soldering 101 refresher course. I made a couple of decent lines before I started screwing up. After that Joe jumped in and we started taking turns. By the time I stopped for the afternoon I was able to make two parallel tracks six spaces long with no bleed over or yellowing and Joe was getting close. After that we started talking about simple motors since we had copper wire laying around and I showed them one I made with my physics students.

While I was doing the electronics part, Lori and Joe were working with Dr. Hoeinghaus on the sensors, including setting up a YSI and giving him a run down on the artificial stream.