FOG-SN00100 Online Lab Book and Field Notes
Latest information is given at the top. Times and dates are UTC.
2025/03/14 15:30 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: The wires going to the power relays from the raspberry pi should be set up as follows. The positive to the CDP instrument relay should be on pin 15 and the ground on any of the available ground options. Then the positive going to the relay to control the blower fans should be on pin 11 with the ground again being on any available option. The way to know which pins are grounds would be by going to this link and using this as reference to everything stated above. https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/introduction-to-the-raspberry-pi-gpio-and-physical-computing/gpio-pins-overview
2025/03/05 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: The G-CDP has now been deployed on the roof of Clifford hall right outside of room 601 of Clifford hall. There was an hour of data collected during this initial deployment which did provide back some counts even though there was no presence of fog or any cloud material for that matter at ground level. The code to turn the CDP on and off was also tested of which it proved to work perfect for the situation. Fans were also installed during this time and were turned on during this initial setup and data collect run.
2025/03/02 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: Electrical box has now been officially incorporated into the design of the G-CDP where this electrical box has the raspberry pi 4, power supply for the CDP, electrically relay switch, and CDP data converter all present in the covered electrical box to keep it out of the elements during deployment of the G-CDP.
2025/02/28 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: Code has been written to automatically control the CDP power with the use of the raspberry pi power pins and an electrical relay switch. This python code is under the name CDPPowerControl.py and works by typing in the command to start the program and then add on or off to the end of the starting command which then tells the code to either power up the power relay switch or turn it off.
2025/02/12 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: ADPAA file output code is now being added to the CDP.py program to then give an output file each time the G-CDP is told to collect data. This output file will be overwritten each time new code comes through from the CDP and will then output the most up to date file possible for the data collection period as it is active.
2025/02/03 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: Code has now been updated to not need a 32 or 48 byte converter library. Instead I wrote the code to do this conversion using code that is already in python to do 16 byte conversions and then some mathematical formulas to convert the numbers properly.
2025/01/27 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: Issue has been resolved with the bin counts not properly being sent from the CDP to the raspberry pi. This was due to an issue with the send command not being properly written as the manual described it to be. I created a program called PADSReader.py which acts as a reader between the communication of the CDP to the PADS software used on a different computer. Also, do not use the serial.encode('utf-8') in python if you already know what that conversion should look like. Just send the byte string that you know works instead of running it through that converter which then messes that code up.
2025/01/13 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: Coding for the G-CDP is operational but the bin counts are not being sent properly this is possibly due to an issue with the setup command.
2024/12/17 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: Serial data output is being read from the CDP and is now ready to be broken apart and then interpreted into usable ADC values that will contribute to data.
2024/12/07 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: Code has been started for the CDP.
2024/11/01-30
Bryce R. Rickbeil: The CDP was deployed at Dr. Delene's home laboratory where it has collected some fog data and also some data from the burning of cloud seeding flares. The next major step that will be taken will be the implementation of a code to act as the PADS software but instead will be programed using python and will allow us to do more things with the data that was collected.
2024/10/25 18:00 UTC
Bryce R. Rickbeil: The housing for the Cloud Droplet Probe itself has been built and now the next steps are to figure out what will be used to house the electronics and how will things be getting powered.