Oh Dear

I’ve neglected my blog rather thoroughly.  What’s happened since then…

I’ve ordered a tripod for the monitoring station, and I’ve moved all of the equipment to it.  I’m actually a little nervous right now.  This is the first windy storm we’ve gotten since I’ve ordered it and I’m sincerely hoping it won’t get blown over.  But I won’t know for… three more minutes.  Obviously that could cause some serious damage to our system.

I went to the Oceanography Lab with Alex to help him calibrate the 3″ flow meter.  I don’t know how accurate the data we collected are, but it was a lot of fun.  The Lab wasn’t what I expected.  It’s a big concrete pool.  The machinery that goes into simulating the ocean is amazing. But despite all the water possible in that lab.  It is very dusty.  And where we were calibrating became very muddy.  I did get to push a 55 gal drum full of water over, too.  But I think it took two days for my shoes to dry out.

I just checked the hobolink, and I did get a rain spike.  SO, at least for a while, it was upright.  I probably will have to wait until next time it logs to be convinced because if it blew over after 30 minutes, well, it still was taking rain data until then.  We’ll see.

What else did I do.  We’ve started a writing workshop.  Now for the first time we all were informed that we were going to write a paper.  For the first time after 7 week.  Great timing guys. If I had known it was coming I’d be less rankled by it. The whole thing has been a little bit frustrating.  However, I was already going to have to write a paper for Dr. Shine, so I’ll just turn in one copy to each person, and all are satisfied. I have already started it.  It’s going to be a complete detailed record of what I’ve done over the summer, so that the person who picks up our project will hopefully know what I’ve done to some degree of accuracy.  It will probably be too long for the conference proceedings.

Alex and I have started the poster, as well.  We have a pretty awesome background that will hopefully be visually stimulating enough to make our poster stand out.  I can’t decide if I want to have my laptop there or not.  I kinda do because that means people could check out the data real time. which would be pretty dang awesome.  However, I don’t want Lappy to get dropped or broken in anyway. Maybe I’ll check out the CHE laptop.  That could work.  I’ll probably have to do that now.  Or soon, anyway.

Annette is back from vacation.  She had a good time.  She did tell me something I can do with the data I’ve collected, because we don’t really have everything we need to make the overall heat flux model.  I’m glad she had some ideas.  I was coming up dry.  I think she’s going to have me quantify the “thermal capacitance of the soil.  How much heat does the soil absorb before it is transferred to the roof.  I don’t think it will be too difficult.  I hope. At least now we will have a “Data Collected” section on our poster. Possibly even “Results.”

Mike and Cathy had their last week.  Their presentation was neat, and their poster turned out pretty.  I don’t think I actually read anything on it, but it was nicely put together.  I’m hoping our poster will be similar.  Lots of pictures.  Pretty colors.  No one reads anything else.   One can dream.

I can’t remember if I told you or not, so I’ll say it again.  Mike’s part of the project was to acquire plants for the roof.  Well, test plants that we would put on the solvent shed, which is our test roof.  It’s a little mini pilot study.  We’ve been approved to put 14 – 2×2  grids on the solvent shed. I think that will be helpful in evaluating the effectiveness of the green roof.  We have 4 on there now and I am collecting data which is available on the link a couple posts down.   Cathy’s part of the project was using the data I got from the Ag Farm to predict water runoff values from the roof and thereby giving us a maximum flow rate for the flow meter.  Go Cathy.

Data

BTW, if you want to see the data from the monitoring station you can see it here:  https://www.hobolink.com/p/8776902f4baa87465c0f797d02dfbe40   It’s not completely done yet, because I don’t have labels on all of the temperature sensors, yet, but you can our data.  real time!  We have one temperature sensor inside the solvent shed, one underneath the 8″ test plot, one in the 8″ test plot, on in the 4″ test plot, and air/humidity sensor, a soil moisure senor in one of the 8″ test plots, a rain bucket, and a wind vain, which still needs to be calibrated correctly.

I just have one thing to say….

IT’S ALIIIIIIIVE!  

I’ve only been struggling with the data logger for how long?  I knew it was something simple.  Something easy that was standing in my way to monitoring station success.  It turns out the MAC address was wrong, and it had to be re-registered with the network.  But man-o-man.  I’m so relieved to be done with it.  I’m not even really relieved, I’m so relieved.  I think I may have creeped out Dan in the lab, though.  Cuz all a sudden I’m like, “YES!, woo!” and then I stood up out of my chair and said, “Come here.  Come on  (cuz he was looking at me a little funny)”  and I gave him a hug.  I think today will be officially FREE HUG DAY.  Anyone who wants a hug can say to me, “How’s the monitoring station?”

TAKE THAT DATA LOGGER!  INYOURFACE!

WHat?!!

Hi.  I read one technical article yesterday.  That was it.  It was the most gawd-AWFUL article.  Confusing and dense.  It wasn’t written clearly.  I know I am rusty on my Transport, but that was rediculous.  I couldn’t even summarize it.

Shine wants me to order some more parts for the monitoring station (that still isn’t connecting to the internet).  She also decided to change the number of indoor sensors we need.  !!! She said we needed one so I ordered ONE! >.< I have trouble understanding her communications.  If I have a clear goal, I can achieve that goal easily, as is usually the case with all focused projects.  But, Shine has a tendency to change her mind about what she wants between updates.

I think this is a clear case of personality mis-mash.  I am, according to Meyers-Briggs, an ISTJ.  I need logical compartmentalized information.  I need it clearly presented so I can methodically step through my work.  I think Shine is an IFNJ.  Sometimes we just don’t really see eye to eye.

Wha?

Hey guys.  I thought I’d share my code with you.  I’m proud of it, even though it doesn’t do much.  I certainly can’t program in C++ or MatLab or whatever, but I can slop some VBA Excel out, and here it is.  It adds a border to a column at the end of a “rain event”, and can tell you how much rain fell during the event, and the average rate.  I may have to fiddle with it later this week, because the may change the “rain event” definition.  Anyway.  Here it is:

Oh Joy!

What day is it?  Tuesday?  Tuesday.  Oh man.  You know you’re out of it when… I’m kinda a little bit frustrated.  Just a smidge.  I’ve been trying for 4 days to get the data logger to connect to the friggin’ internet.

First, I just connected it, and all the sensors were plugged in, but it wasn’t logging any data, so I messed around with the software that they sent us and I found out that I could manually launch it.  So I did.  All of the sensors work great.  I’m calibrating the rain bucket for the 3rd time, though.  The first time, I stopped the data logger (b/c I was trying to get it to connect to the internet) and forgot to pull the data off first, and I unplugged it to “cycle the power” like direction said.  Poof.  Data gone!  *greeble*  Then, I ran it again, and it turned out that the bucket was only tipping 93 times in 473 mL.  Which is 7 less than it should be.  So now I’m running it again.

I did feel rather ingenious setting it up, though.  I like when I feel inventive/creative.  I snagged a sprite bottle from our ethics seminar (which I will not discuss here, because I don’t have very many good things to say about it), and I poked a hole in the bottom with a box cutter and a file.  The hole was too big, so I put electrical tape on it to make the hole smaller and poked a hole through the tape with a pen.  Then I put water in it to calibrate the bucket, and set it on the debris screen, and the water drains out into the funnel.  A simple set up.

I found out my professor is going on vacation.  I don’t know how I feel about this.  I’m sure I can work on stuff while she’s gone.  I even have an idea what that stuff should be.  But I don’t if I’ll be motivated to do so without the external pressure.

I need to find a place (other than the lab to set up this monitoring station.  Probably the solvent shed.  and I need to order a tripod to mount the logger on.  Then I could actually start getting heat flux data.  I have lots and lots and lots of technical documents to read.  Plus, I need to find (possibly order) a water level senor for the runoff system.    Then I could start developing the heat flux model.  I could probably write a macro for Cathy to help her sort the rain data some more.  That wouldn’t be terrible.  All that stuff.  Easy enough to do.

But for now, I still need to get the data logger to work.  Data logger!  I called Tech support and he seemed rather stupefied.  The only thing he could suggest was that maybe we needed a static IP address instead of a dynamic one.  So I emailed David Caldwell, who said that dynamic was fine.  What now?  Well, we’ll see.  I think I’m close to getting a migraine on this one.  As soon as my rain bucket calibration gets done, I’ll try the list of stuff that the tech buy gave me.

Now you know.

Whoops.

I’ve been really bad about posting this week.  I don’t really know why.  There’s not been that much going on, really.   I did some research on Monday and started stifting through the rain data.  1.5 years worth of data, logged every 5 minutes.  That’s 151713 data points that is 10 columns deep.  That’s a LOT of data.

Tuesday I didn’t feel so hot in the morning so I didn’t go in to the office, but I did work from home.  I wrote a VBA Excel macro to sort through the rain data.  I was pretty proud of myself for finishing it because I hadn’t used VBA for almost 2 years.  Mabye longer.  But despite the fact that it took me most of the day, I do believe it saved me a lot of time because sorting through all that data by hand would have been  murder.  All of the data is sorted chronologically by “rain event” and has the total rainfall and average ranfall rate in “/hr next to each event.  TAKETHATDATA!

Yesterday, I spent all morning at a COMSOL demo.  I think Annette was hoping I would get to play with the software and possibly use it to model the roof.  But heck no at all!  I spent it listening to a mildly enthusiastic man tout the praises of his software.  Then I got to work through one of those pre-fab training packets that, if your are good at skimming, takes no time, no effort, and are not in the least bit informative.

I will finish this post later.

One Down!

I think as of tomorrow I can check off one of my goals.  Well almost.  Half check my my goals.  I think  we are going to order the monitoring station for the green roof.   I pretty much will get the final quote tomorrow.  Then order.   

I know what it will be for once we get it, but I wonder where exactly we will put it. 

Shine says something about a storage shed today.  If we could do that it would be pretty awesome because the shed isn’t AC’d and they want to put a test green roof on it.  SO, we could have pre-and post green roof data with a room that actually would show results.  The actual class room they want to cool has AC in the summer, so you can’t get data about how the green roof would actually affect it.  It’s in the winter that the class room gets to be 90 degrees.  Go figure.

Thank you Alex!

I would like to thank Alex for my newest idea.  I’ve been so stuck on trying to find water level sensor that would measure the pressure of the water, and not be damaged when dry or wouldn’t displace a bunch of water.

It was going to Walmart that actually gave me the idea.  Alex had never seen a stoplight that was pressure triggered, because NY, where he’s from, they are all just timed.  I think that’s what planted the idea, because I think if I could find a sensor that could sensitively measure stress applied by the water on the sensor, we could calculate the water runoff from roof.    Sigh of relief.

We’ll see if this idea comes to any kind of fruition.

Let the after-work activities begin!

Woot!  A day without rain.  This is awesome possum!  We are actually going to get to do one of the NISE get together activities.  I think today it’s the picnic. Tomorrow, the world!  But for real, I’m excited that I will do something beyond to work and go to my apartment. And occasionally the grocery store.  I seriously need to get over my “I” and be more like “E” for a while.  I need to start remembering the people I work with’s names!  I think there’s a Chelsea, and a Cherry (like sherry). There’s an Alan and an Alex, and a Kate.  And that’s it.  I know half of the people.  I can’t remember the professors either.  I know Buma and Shine.  … yea.

I don’t know how I feel about the ethics seminar.  I know he likes us to expand our minds and go beyond and learn something.  But I tell you what it, it’s mosttimes boring and the rest mildy confusing.  The other day, for example, he posed the ethical delema of hanging a picutre, supposing you were babysitting your nephew.  Now, I thought his example was going to be something to the effect of, “Do you have the kid hold the nail while you hammer” or “Do you have the kid hang the picure even it’s a risk to his health.” Logical ethical delemas.  No.  His example was, “Suppose you don’t have a hammer, do you use your nephew’s head instead”  In my brain I was all like, “wha?.. o,O”  Who would ever think of that?  Suffice it to say, I don’t know how much more of that I could take.   Anyway, I need to find something to do.  Ta ta!

Just as an afterthought, for the un-NISE people that may be looking at this blog, here is a link to the UDel website, that has links to everything that we are doing.

http://www.nise.udel.edu/