Monthly Archives: February 2019

Sensor Testing Complete

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By: Alicia Veach

Tests have been conducted on the following sensors: pressure, temperature, turbidity, and electrical conductivity/total dissolved solids. These sensors have been implemented into LOOM_Library. This iteration of Smart Rock will include these six measurements.

In future Smart Rocks, water velocity, dissolved oxygen, pH, and nitrate will be researched for implementation. We look forward to determining the feasibility of these measurements closer to the summer of this year.

Additionally, this Smart Rock will utilize a Reed Switch. The switch allows for the Smart Rock to remain dormant until a user interacts by holding a magnet near the device. Smart Rock can save battery this way.

This Smart Rock will also use a feather m0 adalogger featherwing– an add-on to the feather m0 that has a real time clock and micro SD storage.

For the upcoming weeks, a custom PCB, internal structure, and external structure will be designed to make the Smart Rock compact, water proof, and electronics accessible. A ceramic shell will be custom made to make the device look like a rock while keeping electronics hidden.

OPEnS House, Setting Up a Live Demo

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Author: Kamron Ebrahimi

OPEnS House:

OPEnS House 2019 was a public event where academics from Oregon State University and industry professionals interested in environmental sensing could check out some awesome projects, ask questions and get a better idea of some of the research going on within the lab.

For the event the SlideSentinel team decided to get a working demo up and running to showcase the system so far. This demo provided the perfect opportunity to integrate working components into a single coherent system.

To set the demo up the team deployed the hub on top of OSU’s Weiniger Hall. The Hub contained the RTK GPS module, the Freewave Z-90 for receiving NMEA strings from the rover and the Adafruit FONA 808 for making HTTP requests to the PushingBox API capable of logging the rover locations in realtime to a Google spreadsheet. The total distance between the hub and rover was roughly 1000ft. This was super exciting news as the link travelled through multiple concrete buildings and data was still being received by the hub, intact and at a consistent rate.

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The Rover for the demo featured a relay module tired to a real time clock and accelerometer. Upon substantial orientation change or movement the accelerometer would flip the relay to power the devices, and the Rover would attempt to get an RTK fix and begin sending NMEA strings to the hub. For a better visual representation of the system the team logged the coordinates on the Google spread sheet to a Google map in real time.

The demo went incredibly well and it was super exciting to see all of the components working together! During the live demonstrations team members would take the rover and go on a brief walk, and spectators could observe as the rovers location was logged live to the Google map in real time.

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The OPEnS house was an awesome opportunity to showcase some of the work that has gone into this project. The team met multiple other researches and academics interested in the technologies we are developing and are looking forward to a live deployment in March.