My name is Hunter Lien and I am one of the new additions to the OPEnSampler team! I’m currently a senior here at Oregon State University getting my degree in computer science focusing on computer security. I first got into computer science back in freshman year of highschool when my school started a computer science program. Every level of the class was taught by a single teacher, Mr. Bartlo and I consider him the biggest contributing factor to my interest in this field. He always encouraged us to move outside our comfort zone and even helped us get funding for projects that might have required additional hardware.

Travis, Chase, and I make up the senior capstone group responsible for developing an Android application capable of interfacing with the OPEnSampler hardware. We will be working on this for the next 6 months at which point we aim to have a functioning product. All three of us will be posting weekly blog posts on the OPEnSampler website to let you all know how progress is going in whatever area of the application we happen to be working on. I’m really excited to get started with this project and can’t wait to be part of it’s success.

A Bit About Capstone:

Earlier this year, OPEnS Lab submitted several project proposals to Oregon State University’s capstone course for computer science (CS) students. Capstone (or Senior Design) is a three-term course in which students work in small teams on projects that solve real-world problems. One of OPEnS Lab’s proposals was to enhance the OPEnSampler with GSM support enabling long-distance status updates, and to ease the sampler’s configuration with a mobile app that will communicate with the Sampler over Bluetooth. That’s where we come in!

I won’t go into too much detail in this post, but you’re welcome to read the problem statement we prepared for capstone, available in our fork of the OPEnSampler GitHub repository.

(If seeing PDFs in git hurts you, rest assured we’ll be doing some cleanup and reorganization in the near future.)

Right now, we’re mostly getting started by preparing written documents that will guide our future work. The week before last we finalized our problem statement, and this week we’ve been working on drafting a requirements specification. Although we don’t have an exact time-line laid out, our end game is to have completed this project by OSU’s Undergrad Engineering Expo during the Spring (where we will be presenting our contributions).

A Bit About Me:

I’m Travis Whitehead, a Computer Science student at OSU with the exciting opportunity to work on the OPEnSampler for my capstone project (along with my teammates Hunter and Chase– who will also be introducing themselves in separate posts). As I don’t have a lot of background experience with mobile development, microcontrollers, GSM, or Bluetooth specifically– I’m expecting to learn a lot this year!

As a free software enthusiast, I’m delighted about the “Openly Published” aspect to OPEnS Lab. In my spare time, I work as a Student Systems Engineer at OSU’s Open Source Lab a (similar sounding) organization that provides various forms of hosting for open-source projects. Luckily, there’s room in my heart for more than one open lab.

This is the first of many updates I’ll be writing as we continue to work on this project– So stay tuned!

Hello, my name is Chase Coltman, I one of the three capstone students working on the new companion app for the OPEns Lab Water Sampler, OpenSampler. I am excited to bring some of my previous mobile development experience to this project and make a great addition to this team. Currently, I am in my Senior year at Oregon State University, and I am studying Applied Computer Science, with a focus in Simulation and Game Programming. I am thrilled to be a part of this team and can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Previously here at Oregon State, I have taken several classes that will be very beneficial to our assignment. Two of the most beneficial classes I feel will contribute the most to this project are Mobile Software and Cloud Development, and Intro to Usability Engineering. My Mobile Software and Cloud Development class will likely be the most useful as we focused on app development, however we did not cover certain things like GSM or BLE, which is going to play a very large role in the companion app. My other class, Intro to Usability Engineering, was more about general UI design, good user/design focused elements such as Affordance, Consistency and of course Usability.