General Goals

The goals of this program are to:

• Have Fun
• Learn
• Contribute
  • open source
  • science
  • our community

Project goals:

• create a piece of hardware that can sense an environment variable
• report it back to a global data repository
  • via WiFi
    • Pros: simplest, lowest cost, can get network time
    • Cons: lowest range, high power usage
  • via LoRaWAN
    • Pros: long range, low power
    • Cons: dedicated hardware (gateways) and backend services required; need GPS for time(?)
• improved data visualization

Stretch goals:

• enclosure and mechanics
• battery management
• sensor management (heating, cleaning, timing…)
• longer term/wider community involvement
• comparative data visualization and analysis (animations?)

What is Open Source

Overly simplified, "open source" means providing the blueprints to building something. Typically it’s the human readable text that a computer can translate into a computers "native language" (machine code) that it can then follow and execute.

However these principles have been extended to include designs and instructions for almost every field and endeavor.

It can also be seen as a widespread and effective application of the scientific method:

objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation.

A key part of the scientific is repeatability.

You can view every use of an opensource project as someone performing an experiment, and every bug report, "how to" article, and contributed change as improving and clarifying the established facts (about the project.)

Practically Speaking

Open source software is often associated with widely distributed communities of users and contributors. Not only geographically, but also in time.

To work effectively some conventions, or loose standards, have evolved to make it easier to share both the code and knowledge about using it.

This first section is intended to discover and practice the most commonly used services and conventions.