Thursday, January 5, 2012

Winter Projects Update

The first project I worked on was researching options for salinity and temperature sensors that we could connect to our robot. I ended up writing a report that can be briefly summarized as follows:

The most used tool to collect salinity and temperature data with a VideoRay ROV is the YSI Sonde with Multiple Water Sensors. The main problems were that it was too large and too expensive. Another option was to build the sensors. I found freely available circuit diagrams for these sensors and looking at the parts they would require, building them would cost very little. The problem with this option was that whatever we make would not be guaranteed to work in our application and environment.

After the team read the report, it was agreed that the YSI Sonde with Multiple Water Sensors was too expensive and we would most likely need to build all our sensors. Fortunate for us, during the break Dr. Clark was contacted by an employee of the company that makes our ROV and was offered a temperature sensor. Currently the team is working on connecting our sensors to a microcontroller to better organize the collection of data.

The second project I worked on was the Google Earth project. This project is about displaying the cultural and scientific data, that we will be collecting in Malta and Sicily, in a way that is useful for archaeologist, marine biologists, teachers and students. I was specifically working on evaluating the application, Google Earth, as a practical way to disseminate our information. My findings supported the use of Google Earth as a way to connect geographical and location based data with the database of our scientific and cultural data. I also built an example web page connecting Google Earth with some of our older data that can be seen below.

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