Mid Course Check-In

Hey Everyone,

We're halfway through the course, whoop! 

Congratulations on making it this far. 

We've covered a lot, and though the videos are longer than originally expected, we're building a strong foundation. 

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how far we’ve come. So if you can, take a moment to remember what you knew before starting the course, and what you know now. 

Over the past few months, we’ve covered: 

  • how to use the command line to interact with, and test your application. 
  • how to read a temperature and humidity sensor, and set a 'threshold' temperature to check for.  
  • how to read the battery voltage using an analogue-to-digital converter, and what affects an ADC's accuracy
  • how to use real-time clocks and what affects an RTC's accuracy, 
  • the different types of SD cards and the importance of program / erase cycles, and how to create, delete, read and write to files on your sd card
  •  How to use interrupts, programming pushbuttons, how PIR motion sensors work, and how to adjust their sensitivity and timing. 
  •  how to put all our separate functionality into one application, and how to add our own diagnostics so we know when our device is down. 

That's huge! 

How is everyone going with it?

Are you still with us? Are you working your way through Module 2 or mega-module 3, or are you twiddling your thumbs waiting for the next drop? Has it sparked any ideas for custom hardware in your next field deployment?

Reply below with where you’re up to.

We’re scheduled to release Module 5: Optimising our Application mid March, and will host a live ‘Mid Course Catch Up’ shortly afterwards. 

If you have any topics you want to cover in the live catch up (course related or not), post them here: https://www.wildlabs.net/community/thread/1065

If you have ideas for functionality or sensor add-ons to the WildLogger, let us know here: https://www.wildlabs.net/community/thread/1076

We’re planning for mid March as Akiba and I will be in the field for the next 3 weeks, piloting an in-situ soil health monitoring system. The device will be monitoring soil moisture, co2, pH and temperature. 

It’s an experiment in collaboration with researchers from Monash University and Bush Heritage Australia, and we’re really excited to see how it goes! (more info here if you’re interested).

Thanks for your patience and flexibility, and looking forward to finishing out the course with you all :)

Yay!

Jacinta




I'm still very much interested, but I rather do it all at once at my own pace so I'm waiting out a bit so I can go through all at once. I think so far I've done up to Module 2 or 3. I still check in to see how it's progressing, but haven't done any work on it myself lately. However, everything is still at my desk, I didn't put it away!

I think this whole series is a very valuable tool and will open up a vast amount of possibilities for people to collect data for their projects, so useful to have such a workshop here all in one place.