setting up a geo-data website for rad readings

[Jerry Isdale]

Aloha oahu makers

I'm looking to recruit some volunteers to help get a web site up that could be used to crowd source radiation readings here in Hawaii.  Something akin to the http://blog.safecast.org/maps/  site.   I have one of the Safecast Onyx devices and am turning it over to another Maui Maker to work on.  Its a decent detector but lacks the gps and net links.  Works fine with arduino, PC, etc to collect readings.

HiCap has a larger number of web people than we do over here on Maui.  Some with a fair bit of Open Data experience.

What sort of challenge do you think it would be to create a web site/db/map where people could submit readings/location/time  so we could get SOME data out and visible to the public?

Another side of this would be the What Does It All Mean, Mr Wizard section that would try to give a layman's introduction to understanding the data.  Something to counter the rampant OMG THERES A LEAK web pages with bogus maps of tidal surges.

Could we get a multi-island team to pull this off? 

And get data sourced?  (love to get some really good equipment to calibrate with)

Jerry Isdale

isd...@gmail.com

http://mauimakers.com

http://spaceGAMBIT.org

[WebDawg]

I would think that you would want that device to connect out to a main site...

That is you could need to create an api to submit readings through.

Would be nice to create a portable device also that someone could set out for a day to two in different places that would either upload upon connect or utilize a cell connection.

It is a pity that safecast does not give the source for their site.

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[Patrick Walters]

This is a pretty cool project. I'm not a dev, but l'll help get your organized if you're looking for that kind of help.

It seems to me, the more difficult part of this project is going to be deciding on a security model to identify the device, bind it to a user and authentication for both to upload data. For instance, will the device collect data and be retrieved or is the plan to have the devices upload data in real-time? Will these devices be owned by individuals or owned by an organization and loaned out. All of these will impact the implementation on the device and the server side. 

If I was building something like for work here's a scenario I'd build first. 

First off, get the devices logging data into a CSV format (or small internal DB). Then I'd take those CSVs (or extract them from the device) by connecting the device to a PC.  I assume the have USB connectivity which mounts a file system to the PC to you don't need to do anything fancy, just a file copy. From there, I'd login to the web site, select the device for which I have new data and and upload the file which would append the data to the database.

On the display side, I'm sure there are some cool visualization tools out there. It really depends on the the framework chosen by the developer. I'm familiar with a few Business Intelligence (BI) frameworks which I've used for charts and graphs for project management and built into some data center management products, but I never used their mapping features. I guess the main visualization you need is a heat-map showing the strength of the readings (i.e the high reading are "hot" and the low readings are "cool"). Would be cool to add a time element and animate it so you can see the change in the heat-map over time. Let me look into that a little more and I'll reply back later.

I'm curious to hear what others think as well.

-patrick

[WebDawg]

https://api.safecast.org/

On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Jerry Isdale <isd...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Burt Lum]

We should consider aggregating the data somewhere. The Univ. of Hawaii just launched their open data portal at:

http://data.hawaii.edu/

I am sure if we could tie this into a UH project we could aggregate the data there, especially if this were a State wide effort. 

We would need to decide what the common data format is and is there a standardized way to capture that data.

Burt

On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Jerry Isdale <isd...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Patrick Walters]

And we're done. ;-)

-p

[Brian Russo]

There's presently an EPA Radnet station in Honolulu for air monitoring (data is online). By the time any radiation from Fukushima gets here it's going to be pretty evenly mixed. Have you done any kind of pilot survey to compare results from different sites around the islands? I'd be surprised if there is, barring point sources locally, but it'd be interesting to see.

- bri

[WebDawg]

"By the time any radiation from Fukushima gets here it's going to be pretty evenly mixed. Have you done any kind of pilot survey to compare results from different sites around the islands? I'd be surprised if there is"

Why do you say this?

[Brian Russo]

Because that's what happens when contaminants are released from a point source into the atmosphere (or any fluid for that matter). They disperse due to eddies, pressure/temperature gradients, or other causes of turbulent diffusion.

It's just a larger scale version of what happens if you watch smoke from a cigarette, etc. In the immediate area there will be large differences in concentration. So if you're say 10 feet from a smoker moving just a few feet in the right direction can make a huge difference. But if you're a mile a way then you would never even notice and even if you had instruments to measure it, moving them a few feet left or right would likely make no difference as whatever detectable contaminants remain would be pretty evenly dispersed relative to the local area.

Even if there are differences in measured values you'd have to understand the properties of your sensor well to validate those very small differences are true vs variations sensor to sensor, sampling methods,  or other repeatability issues.

Which is not to say this is necessarily a bad idea or it shouldn't be done (seems cool to me), but simply to state my opinion that I wouldn't expect to see much difference and even if you did validate a true difference it would probably be so small as to not impact a rational decision. 

But who knows, maybe you find something interesting. Just seems like a smarter use of resources to try to look for a problem on a small scale before trying to quantify it on a large one. E.g. Go to 10 places on Oahu and see if there is any difference. 

OTOH, there are probably lots of other contaminants that one would reasonably expect to vary around the island at meaningful levels. E.g. Pollution from HECO, traffic, other industry point sources.

- bri

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[Patrick Walters]

Their is a company which has an air pollution sensor and network

http://airqualityegg.com/

-p

[Patrick Walters]

BTW, here's a few rows of data from the Safecast site if anyone wants to see the columns.

-p