Week 4 Day 5

Today was sort of an all over the place day (Friday's seem to be like that.) We started off with a bit of a surprise when we counted the fish in our tank and realized 13 were missing. Joe pounced on that and did some research to see what might be going on. We had already ruled out them committing suicide (though it did occur to us recently that perhaps they were jumping out and a janitor was providing them a burial at sea) and the possibility of the pump pulping them. Here is what Joe came up with:

We made observations and took readings in our stream system this morning. Most fish congregated in tank 4. Beginning today we determined to take a count of the number of fish in each tank.

	pH	DO	Temperature	# of Fish
Tank 1	7.01	7.6	20.46	2
Tank 2	7.7	7.4	2.47	2
Tank 3	7.9	7.8	20.47	9
Tank 4	8.01	7.3	20.43	9

It took a while to count fish because they harbor in crevices between rocks. It helped to tap on the sides of tanks to “scare” them out. We counted 13 fewer fish than what we placed on Tuesday. We are baffled by the fewer number. After some quick research I found that minnows can tolerate a wide of temperatures but their preferred temperature range is 70 F- 90 F. http://www.co.washoe.nv.us/repository/files/4/v_gambusia.pdf

Gambusia Minnows “Mosquito Fish”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambusia_affinis



After all that we talked to Sharon and she said, "Maybe they big ones are just eating the little ones. They eat about their own body weight every day." Apparently we need to feed them more...


After that we got back to soldering. Joe kept working on his noise maker from yesterday and conquered the task.

While Joe was working on that Lori and Jennifer took a broken Simon Says game and a house made out of circuit boards and wired them up so that they had a solar powered house (I did a little cutting for them.)

This morning Yixin unveiled Circuit v4.0 for his where he simplified things a bit (still hyper-complicated) and I appreciate that because it means I don't have to hand wind transformers.

With that as my model I started the process of replicating that beast of a circuit four times.

Sadly, I didn't make it all that far. If you actually look at the circuit board that Yixin built you can see that there are actually 5 seperate circuits involved in the sensor cluster and we have just integrated them on to one board. What you see here is one of those circuits completed and replicated four times. It doesn't look like much but this took me most of the day to do. Granted, I am far from an expert. If you need more proof of that look at the last picture just above this paragraph and compare the solder tracks I made to the solder tracks in the completed sensor cluster Yixin slapped together in his spare time while eating a sandwich. *sigh*


While we were sitting around the table soldering we were also discussing some changes we would like to make to the artificial stream when we replicate it in our classroom. One thing we want to do is get larger and deeper tubs so that we can vary the environment more and add a larger variety of fish. We were also thinking there might be a way to simplify the riffles by cutting down some of the accordion tubing that you connect to a gutter downspout and using that. It would have the ridges built in so you wouldn't need rocks and you could vary the size and number of ridges by expanding or shortening the tubing.

Future plans for stream riffle. This flex elbow will create riffles which would prevent having to add gravel to channels.
http://www.lowes.com/ProductDisplay?partNumber=137534-205-3708419&langId=-1&storeId=10151&productId=3012598&catalogId=10051&cmRelshp=rel&rel=nofollow&cId=PDIO1

Storage Bins that would work for tubs:http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=8282895&findingMethod=rr#Specifications