I have not written on any of the projects we have on our plate for quite awhile because they have been in flux. An opportunity has come up for me to help out with a project for a professor at Troy’s school (NCSU). I had been trying to figure out how to combine the Volcano computer project (that is on hold right now because Mt. St. Helens is so quiet), Christian’s C++ programming, and our desire to do some robotics work. The plan is for Troy to manage a small research program that involves a camera that looks at water. His water blog is really a better place for a description of the progress we make on the project, but I will try to describe some of the work Christian and I do on this blog. Our plan is to start putting some of the equipment together this weekend.
It is a very cool project. The plan calls for three computers. The first one is inside a camera that looks at an outdoor scene (or a scene in a lab made to look like an outdoor scene) of a body of water. The second one is a webserver that wirelessly receives the images from the camera and hosts a website that can be viewed from the internet. The third one controls some robotic devices that control pumps, water motion actuators, light controllers, and hardware to move the lights to create shadows and bright spots in the scene to see if the system can still work in varying conditions.
This weekend, Christian and I hope to put to gether the second computer. We have everything we need for that computer. We will put an Ubuntu based LAMP stack on it. We will also try to get it up on the internet. We have registered an internet address, so Troy will point that out as soon as we have it up and running and we decide we have something to show. The camera should get here sometime next week, so the next step will be to figure out how to get it to transmit pictures to the website. After all that is running, we will start putting the control computer together.
All our other projects are on hold (with the exception of the cat tower) while we work on this. I will post some stuff here on how it is going and I am sure Christian will post some stuff about his parts of the project on NerdHow, but place where we will describe that is on Troy’s water blog.