Showing AMOS Around Town

This past week was a busy one for AMOS. In preparation for the Fredericton e-Hack event on Monday, I spent some time looking up info on LoRaWAN wireless radio kits and map-based GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Here is a link to a map that I made from the Woolastook grid test: https://arcg.is/01C8Gu.

On Saturday, the sun was bright and shining, and I took AMOS back to the same parking lot near the walking bridge, this time just going directly downriver to collect some temperature samples around the mouth of the Nashwaak River. I was able to try out my new $20 anemometer, which told me that the wind was coming out of the north at ~ 15 km/hr on average, with occasional gusts close to 30 km/hr. The current also seemed pretty strong with a lot of waves. AMOS was still able to make forward progress (albeit slow) against the current and wind when it needed to. Unfortunately, the temperature probe did not work for this test, I think because I had melted part of the probe cable's insulation with a soldering iron the night before. It didn't look like the damage was too bad, but I'm guessing that water must have leaked in, because after AMOS got back home and dried out the probe worked fine. Anyway, I made a cool GIS graph with the temperature from inside the electronics enclosure instead:

On Sunday, I took AMOS to the Fredericton e-Hack event at Planet Hatch. Eleven-X and some other organizations were there as sponsors, and LoRaWAN radio kits were distributed to the participants. There were quite a few people there, and most of them went to the event as teams. Anyone at the event could pitch an idea to the assembly of people and then the top 6 ideas were chosen based on a voting system. I pitched the idea of AMOS, along with a simplified version of AMOS connected to a buoy or retrofitted to a boat. I think about 10 people in total pitched ideas, and AMOS barely made it in at 6th place. Then teams were formed for the 6 ideas, and we got to work trying to figure out the wireless kits and get some sort of rough prototype and presentation together. Here's a selfie of team AMOS:

 Unfortunately, nobody was able to get their LoRaWAN wireless kit working. That was the part that I was looking forward to hacking, so that was a bit of a disappointment. We spent the remainder of the time trying to throw together a PowerPoint for the final presentation. As my children will tell you, my PowerPoint skills are very poor, so the presentation didn't look as good as those of other teams, but I thought that the actual content was OK. We didn't place in the top 3, so no prizes were won. :-( However, we did get to meet Mike O'Brien, the mayor of Fredericton and spent a few minutes talking to him about AMOS. I also spoke briefly with a CBC reporter, but so far I haven't been able to find any footage of that.

Today I attended the Canadian Export Challenge at the convention center in Fredericton. There were probably a couple hundred people at this one, and I recognized a lot of the same people from the e-Hack event there. You could do a one minute pitch at this event, and the top 20 pitches were selected to go on to the second of three rounds. AMOS didn't get to the next round, but I did get some useful tips about shipping and exporting, such as: try to get the size of AMOS (and its packaging) down to less than 8 feet long, since that is the standard maximum length that most shippers will handle before things get much more difficult. It was also interesting to hear the stories and advice that the panelists had, and meet some of the other attendees.

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a return to hardware development. I want to get a deployment arm mechanism in place at the back of the boat for deploying sensors into and out of the water.