Riffle project ideas

[Stevie Lewis]

Hi there! 

Long awaited, but sounds like people are starting to get Riffles! I was wondering what people are interested in exploring with them? 

I saw this post from MadTinker who's working on monitoring around mining sites and is looking at a series of water monitoring tools including the Riffle. Awesome! Any other ideas? 

Best,

Stevie

[Mad Tinker]

Howdy hey, 

Yep, going to try to use the Riffle for monitoring water quality around mining sites.  If things go well with setting up the Riffle, I’m also going to try to use it to measure the moisture content of my wood pile. There is a significant relationship between the moisture content of your wood and the particulates given off into the air. 

“If you go from 20 to 30 percent moisture content in wood, just a 10 percent increase, there’s a 67 percent increase in PM 2.5 (particles in the air that are harmful to breathe)”. (http://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/dry-wood-good-wood) .  

Implementation with the Riffle should be straightforward since there is a relationship between moisture content and conductivity.  (Electric Moisture Meters for Wood, US Forest Service. Author William L. James. General Technicl Report FPL-GTR- 6, 1988).  Lots of folks have done some great things with the Riffle to measure conductivity.  Just need to find a bit more time and sell a couple more bottle openers. :)  

Cheers,

Dave Robinson

[Mad Tinker] 

Iron Rain Forge

Creede, CO  

IronRain.us 

[Stevie Lewis]

Hi Dave,

That sounds great! Looking forward to reading about those projects. Anyone have things their thinking about exploring with the Riffle? I've also heard for those just getting started, the blink tests are good first activities. There are some writeups on them here and here from Chris Fastie and Patrick Hixenbaugh. 

Here's a question posted on activities that might be good to think about for exploring the Riffle in water. Hoping to see a post soon about the data loggers explored at the Barnraising as well! 

Best,

Stevie

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[Jeffrey Warren]

Hi, all -- we're still working on getting the remaining Riffles bootloaded and ready to go; has anyone done this with the initial batch that shipped out? This has been complicated by the Kits Initiative move, but we're doing what we can to get these shipped soon. 

I'm interested in how a simple outdoor test setup could be very similar between water testing and air (or any other outdoor) testing. Some of us had brainstormed some weeks ago the idea of strapping a datalogger (like the Riffle) to a stake in the ground, and trailing the sensor wires down into the water. The datalogger could then be in an upturned bottle with the bottom left open, which would be much simpler than waterproofing the entire enclosure. 

I'd hope this would be a viable setup for almost any outdoor datalogger use. It would help keep the setup sequence as consistent as possible whether measuring moisture content of a wood pile or various water quality metrics in a creek, or particulates in the air. It would also be something we could try to document for any datalogger, whether it's a Riffle, a Nano Data Logger, a Pearl Mini Logger, a KnowFlow, a MayFly, or something else.

Have folks tried anything like this kind of "logger on a stick" setup, and have suggestions or issues you've encountered? 

Thanks!

J

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[Chris Fastie]

An upturned bottle is a fine enclosure for a data logger. An upturned bucket, milk jug, paint can, plastic box, or plastic bag would also work as long as they are rain proof. This approach assumes a few things: 

1. The sensors outside of the enclosure are weatherproof or waterproof. 
   
2. The weather can't be too wet or the data logger itself can rust from condensation or splash.
3. If you are monitoring water, the enclosure has to be higher than the maximum water level while you are monitoring.
4. If you are using the temperature sensor on the real time clock to monitor air temperature, the enclosure should be white or in the shade.

The Riffle does not ship with any external sensors, so that will introduce a lot of variation among tests. Most inexpensive sensors are not weatherproof, so they need a separate enclosure if they are separate from the data logger. Some sensors are waterproof and have short cables (e.g., DS18B20 temperature sensor comes with a three foot long cable). To reduce variation among first time experience with the Riffle, shipping it with a $1.30 DS18B20 is a good idea.

In rainy weather, exposed electronics under an open container can encounter enough moisture to rust or short. This is probably not a problem for deployments of just a week or two in moderate weather, or longer in the desert.

A good Hello Riffle exercise might be to log the data from the temperature sensor on the real time clock. That requires only the Riffle and a battery, so everything can go in a closed bottle. I would not encourage people to submerge this setup unless the bottle and seal have been field tested, and the level and current in the body of water are rather predictable. But deploying it outside can provide good air temperature data if the sun does not shine on the bottle. 

After that test, people might be connecting many different kinds of sensors for many different purposes, so there will be less consistency among deployments.

Chris

[Jeffrey Warren]

Great suggestions, Chris, thanks. I agree with your whole list! And I'm glad to hear you think this could work, given assumptions. I'm especially interested in finding an initial **common** stepping stone for people to work towards more advanced or specific setups. 

J

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[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Wow! I'm also really interested in a really inexpensive (waterproof!) external sensor folks could get with the riffle (or other datalogger) as an exercise collecting data from, and working with an external sensor.

It's also so neat seeing what everyone is doing or gearing up to do with these dataloggers!

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