In the morning, all of the RET participants went on a field trip to the Water Research Field Station near the Rafes Urban Astronomy Center. A student led us on a tour of the facilities, including 30 stream flow tanks that the RET Aquatics team will be working with this summer. They will try to design and set up water monitoring stations for the tanks that could be monitored remotely over a wireless connection. We also walked to a nearby stream bed and learned how the landscape changes rapidly with the rise and fall of the stream. As it is currently dry except for a few shallow pools, we observed the recently dried algae, and the student explained how he would don a Ghostbusters’ style backpack that could be used to deliver a mild shock to the water. He would then collect data on the stunned fish that floated to the surface.
 |
| Stream flow tanks currently being worked on |
Afterwards, we worked on flowchart development and met with Li to learn how to set up the Garcia robots, link them to wifi, and run two simple programs to control them manually:
“aGarciaKey.exe” Controls robot using arrow keys (frequently locks up)
“aGarciaTool.exe” Controls robot using left and right wheels independently (works slightly better, but cannot drive the robot in a straight line)
These programs have issues, and in the 5-6 times we’ve run them, they stop functioning within the first few minutes of use, but it is a starting point!
No comments:
Post a Comment