Ivan-cs488-paper

Inexpensive, portable and expendable open source environmental monitoring platform with integrated geocoding

Abstract

The aim of my senior project is to create an inexpensive and portable platform for environmental monitoring sensors. In order to achieve this goal, my paper will deeply explore both hardware and open source software solutions with a final goal of creating a simple monitoring platform consisting of one environmental sensor and a frame support software. A very strong emphasis will be placed on integrated advanced geocoding of data for any sensor reading conducted by this monitoring platform.

Introduction

Everything our civilization have learned so far about the great planet we all live in is mainly coming from observing and monitoring the environment around us. Understanding how our planet works and predicting its behavior is very important and one of the underlying ideas of modern science. In order to implement successful experiments and observations, a complete understanding of complicated environment sensors/instruments is crucial. I personally believe that complexity of monitoring sensors devices such as different operating systems, variety unstandardized data formats they generate and particularly high cost are creating significant friction for many ?eld scientist (mainly Biologists, Chemists, Geologists, Physicists and Environmental Scientists) to do the actual science.

My inexpensive and portable platform aims to remove friction related to extremely steep learning time curve (which is not useful) for every individual monitoring device, their operating systems and variety of different data ?les they generate. The entire project is going to be part of the open source community which will make it easy for everybody to integrate any other sensor with USB interface in to this system.