AMOS Goes Camping

This past weekend I went with my daughter to her triathlon training camp at Kejimkujik National Park in Nova Scotia. We purchased a campsite for two nights and brought the tent, her bike and other triathlon-related equipment, a kayak, and of course AMOS! While Kirsten practiced swimming, biking, and running, I figured I could test out AMOS and follow around in the kayak.

The weather on Friday turned out to be awful though. Tropical storm "Elsa" passed through the area late in the day with high gusting winds and buckets of rain. The fly on our camping tent kept nothing dry, as rain was easily blown underneath, so that by Friday evening, it was basically raining INSIDE the tent too. We  decided to put AMOS, the bike, and most of the other equipment in the tent, and ended up spending the night in the van instead. 

Fortunately the weather on Saturday was much better, and by noon it turned into a sunny hot day. While Kirsten was training around Merrimakedge Beach, I mostly kayaked and observed AMOS as it followed a pre-programmed sampling course. Unfortunately I had forgotten to bring a necessary cable for the depth sensor, but did manage to get some good conductivity and temperature data over a few hours:

 Over the last couple of weeks some progress has been made on the Android app for viewing AMOS and phone / tablet positions on an Esri / ArcGIS map: 

At present you can see the position of AMOS (yellow boat outline), and the position of the phone / tablet holder (white stick figure), but there is no data visible on the map yet, just some diagnostic information below the map.

Wireless Transceiver Design and Possible Blue-Green Algae Pilot Project

One of the projects that In Nature Robotics has been getting some assistance with through IRAP (Industrial Research Assistance Program) and RPC (New Brunswick's provincial research organization) is the circuit board and case layout for the wireless transceiver used by AMOS. The project is nearing completion and the 3D models that I have seen so far look pretty nice:

 There are some remaining issues to sort out about making sure that everything fits into the waterproof box, but these should be solved soon.

Yesterday I had a good meeting with a project manager at the City of Fredericton to discuss AMOS and the possibility of doing a pilot study this summer for measuring blue-green algae levels in the St. John River. A few years ago some dogs died after drinking river water that was contaminated by toxic concentrations of blue-green algae in the river, so the city has some interest in setting up a monitoring program to detect when and where blue-green algae might be a problem.

Later on today I'll be speaking to the Raspberry Pint club... I'll post a quick update afterward on how it went!

Update: The presentation to the Raspberry Pint club went pretty well I think. I was a bit unprepared for the slideshow not working as planned under Google Hangouts, but it seemed to work acceptably well when not presented in full-screen mode.and there was some good interest and questions from the people in attendance afterward. There were other interesting projects presented also; my favorite was a 3.5" floppy disk drive that a guy had rigged up to play individual songs through Spotify. Basically each 3.5" disk had some Spotify-related links and text written to file(s) on the disk which were read and would start playing the desired song after the disk was inserted.

AMOS Featured in the MagPi

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays!

I was planning on taking this week off from the blog, but just discovered this evening that AMOS appeared in the January 2020 edition of the MagPi: https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/issues/89/pdf. This is the official Raspberry Pi magazine. So definitely pretty cool, and worth bragging about! 😊

The magazine edition can be downloaded for free from the above link, but here are some screen captures of parts of it: