Log [12/09/2014]

Log [12/09/2014]:
It's finals week, which is a mixed bag for most of us. Some are completely done with finals, or the end is in sight, so we have more time to devote to the project. Others are swamped and virtually unreachable. We send out our best wishes to our team, and to all other students going through the finals-week(s) struggle!

We have had some progress and updates this week so far, so here we go! 

Data:

Poster update: We did a mock presentation of our first draft of the poster that John, Erika, Daniel Canales, and Hamza will be taking to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco next week. We got some great feedback and are looking into finalized printing options.

John Cao and Erika Marrero do a review our AGU poster with Dr. Dunbar and Dr. Bering

SD Shield update: We believe it was a hardware error (or soldering problem) that caused out heartache from Thanksgiving. Using another Adafruit datalogger shield we have successfully initialized the SD card and ran a very simple example sketch.

ADC Shield update: We have been fighting with the Iowa Scaled Engineering ADC shield and being baffled by the lack of response when we run the basic sketch that comes with the library. After a weekend of confusion, we verified that one of the jumpers on the board was misarraged. With that mystery solved, it is now time to delve into the library code and learn how to use this two-in-one multiplexer and analog-to-digital converter!

VLF Update: I worked with Dr. Bering today to get to work on the OrCAD layout file. We started from the OrCAD Capture project file, specifically the schematic: where we specific the type of connector I wanted to put into the circuit. However, when we tried to look at the footprint (i.e. the actual shape we wanted for the connector and where it should go on the board) using OrCAD layout, there was a conversion error. Dr. Bering understands what happened better than I do. We'll get back at it tomorrow.

DC EF Update: I'm not smart enough to understand what Chris is doing, but he says he feels really good about the work he's been able to get done with him and Dr. Bering in the lab at the same time, so I'm excited to his end result! He also is optimistic about having a test-able device by January 11th.

Goals For Next Few Days:
- Get ADC shield for Arduino to intake multiple sensors and write to SD card shield (test using power supplies)

- Finalize poster layour

- Print poster

Written By:
Rachel Gamblin (USIP-UH member)