What has taken so long and what I’ll actually be doing

So I have yet to explain what we will actually been doing and what I’ve been working on so far. To bring you up to date, I am working on a project that is studying the interaction between blind pedestrians and quiet vehicles. The studies’ focus is really on hybrid vehicles but could easily be expanded to include electric vehicles down the line. Probably after I’m long gone.

For most of the past semester I have been working to update an existing data aquisiton system to meet our current needs. To begin, we need to track multiple vehicle positions and speed in relation to participants responses and sound level measurment recordings. Besides the vehicles tracking, there was an existing system that with little effort has been updated. To track the vehicles we have a separate system that records idependently a vehicles position and speed through GPS.

This is great, but how do we sync the two systems in time? The GPS units record a time. Though that time is different from our laptop time. So an additional GPS unit must be used on the laptop to “sync” the two data sets. Much of the technical work has been done by a tech at the university.

Just to know that we can collect “good” data has taken quite some time and I’m happy to put it into action this coming week. Everything has shipped and we fly out tomorrow. Fingers crossed the next two and a half weeks will go smoothly. More about what we are doing with this data to come later.