Bunch Of Noise

Things I Learned on the Research Trip

jpliskow — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:19:20 +0000

Dry and hot is not so bad.
Arizona does not make recycling easy.
Shipping heavy expensive things is…expensive.
Its better to buy a big box for all your equipment then check it on to the plan.
This big box (found at Home Depot) is actually kind of cool and makes me want one for all my future tools.
California is Beautiful, well San Diego was at least (this day trip was my highlight!).

night

Flight home

jpliskow — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:50:47 +0000

To update, I’m on my flight to DTW. Delta has wifi on some of their flights and I’m taking advantage of it. I mean why not be connected if you can. Here’s a pic to prove it too.

I’ve got to say it is fun to have the web up here. Hulu and video straming is much to chopy to watch a TV episode but everything else I tride worked well. Either way I’ll be home this evening and I can’t wait.

The research trip went very smoothly. The team worked well together and we collected all the data we could. Two and a half weeks ago seems like yesterday. It all felt a bit like camp. You are taken out of our daily grind and nearly souly focused on the research.

Now I get to run through all the raw data and turn it into some zeros and ones that make sense. During the collection I followed plently of zeros and ones but it did not have the rest of the data attached to it. Basically, my job now is to stitch the whole picture back together. Then color it in to bring out the details.

It will take some time to fully analize the data. When I have some conclusions I’ll report back what I can. I also try to give a better description of what I’m working on in the coming weeks.

Day trip to San Diego, CA

jpliskow — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 01:58:22 +0000

It was either Mexico or San Diego and since we knew little about Mexico we figuired San Diego was the better way to go. We hit the road early with no plans in hand. I tweeted out that we were headed there and a friend suggested seeing a Padres game.

So we check and sure enough they were home today, playing against the Diamondbacks. Sweet! We got in about two hours before game time. Pick up some decent tickets for $14 a piece, then walked around and ate at a pretty good middle estern place.

The city seemed quiet, probably because it was a Sunday, but it was beautiful. We noticed some well used mass transit, that got me excited, and the streets were really clean. California seems to have it’s act together in that respect.

Petco Park was a nice field too. They had a lawn in the outfield that we could have sat in. It’s a newer field and you could tell it was built right for the city. Really nice skyline above the outfiled and was easy to walk around.

I love cities were you can walk and San Diego seemed to have a lot you could walk to and do. We hit the beach before leaving. But the weather had turned a bit so we did not get in. I stuck my foot in and the water was chilly. Very cool city and if the rest of the California cities are anything like San Diego I’ve got to add them to my list of places to visit.

We’re headed back to Yuma now for two more days of testing. Then back to Kalamazoo on Wednesday. It has been a great trip but I’m ready to be home and get focused on wrapping up my thesis.

Yuma Week 2

jpliskow — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:45:46 +0000

We’ve wrapped another week down here in Arizona. Our surroundings are beginning to look familiar but I’m ready to finish things here and head home. There are just two more days left before we complete the study. Then we fly back on Wednesday.

The data collection has gone smoothly with only a few hiccups once we got going. It should mean a smoother analysis once we are back. Though there are many many many data points to sift through.

This weekend we are taking it easy and don’t have any big plans. Only to relax and take the time to play a bit of catch up with the rest of the world/lives.

First Week in Yuma, AZ

jpliskow — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:04:59 +0000

It has been a week since we arrived in Arizona for the research project. The first week was mostly checking out our equipment and finishing our setup. We had one full day of testing though we should have had at least two.

There was some excessive wind that prevented us from starting early. When there is too much wind, sound level measurements cannot be accurately measured with a microphone. Also, a portion of the project constructed by some of our partners needed some work that took up a day of testing.

The people of Yuma have been very kind and helpful. Everyone that we have worked with here have been great to work with. The days have been long but these people make it much more easy to get through. We have really lucked out.

Most of our nights have been filled with going over our collected data but on occasion we have been able to enjoy the nights. This weekend we went for a hike not too far away from Yuma.

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

jpliskow — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 03:13:52 +0000

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.

Update before we leave

jpliskow — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:50:12 +0000

The final shipment is in the mail and most of our materials should arrive at the test site tomorrow (per UPS tracking info). One more is on its way and should be there Friday. The rest of the material we’ll carry in our luggage. We keep joking about what TSA is going to think of all our cables and GPS units.

I still have some work to finalize some time syncing issues related to our separate data acquisition systems. Also I need to work on some of the post processing to smooth things along. I’m going to need to become just a bit more familiar with MATLAB to accomplish this.

[Update] As a side, when we got started with the project we had little knowledge of exactly how we would track a bunch of vehicles at once and then align that with the rest of our data. We’ve chosen to use some GPS devices to do this but, they come with there own challenges. Like is the GPS time the same time on our laptop? Are these units really accurate enough to be meaningful?

In the end this is the direction we’ve gone and from all our preliminary testing it is a go and should work just fine. But all these different pieces make things just a little harder to put together. Sometimes I wish there was a plug and play option for these kinds of needs.

A week to go

jpliskow — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:11:25 +0000

We’ve got just over one week to we travel out and start the data collection. A few parts of the set up will ship early, maybe tomorrow, and the rest I’ll send out next week. We have just a few parts to finalize of the data acquisition system. Still will be a busy next few days as we run some of our final tests.

Arizona Trip #1: Video

jpliskow — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:05:40 +0000

Back in Michigan

jpliskow — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:22:36 +0000

I’m back in Michigan ready to finalize all our preparations for when we actually collect data come April and am back in Arizona. The trip provided us some very good time to figure out exactly what we hoped to accomplish with the project. We met with individuals in Arizona that will help to secure some of our logistical needs.

The weather was beautiful. Can’t say I was there long enough to get a tan, but I did feel the heat. Had to use air conditioning once or twice to cool off. I’ve never been to that part of the country and the landscape seemed to extend to the horizon with little more than brush and sand. DRY DRY DRY.

I’ll be happy to go back in a few weeks and hopefully check out the local scene more. Not sure if there really is much but the maybe we’ll meet some nice locals to show us around town. Beyond the travel I’ve got some more work to do to finalize our instrumentation and data acquisition system. It’s close.