Part of my final internship project will be a photo essay about my internship. This photo essay uses related images to explain a topic, or in my case, chronicle an experience. The photos in my essay will go in sequential order from the beginning to the end of my internship. Today, I will be posting my photo essay "starter set" composed of five photos from my internship experience at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
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I have been working at CDIP (Coastal Data Information Program), a program that uses a network of over 60 buoys nationwide to collect wave data. CDIP is located at Isaacs Hall in the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and is full of a variety of great people ranging from programmers to engineers to legal/community outreach professionals. It's fascinating to see the diversity of skills needed to make the buoys work in all the ways they should. As you can see, the location isn't bad either. This is a photo taken on a cliff overlooking the ocean, about 100 feet away from CDIP.
I have had been working on 2-3 main projects while at CDIP, one with each section of the program. I have been working on several informational flyers for community outreach purposes, I have been working in the CDIP "lab" doing some work with the buoys and related equipment and I have been working with a programmer, Grant, to install a clock, called a chronodot, into a mini computer called a Beaglebone. Installation of the chronodots was a long process that required me to have a basic understanding of how to deal with the hardware and software.
The first part of installing the beagle bone was soldering wires onto the chronodots. When they came out of the package, the chronodots had little metal spikes sticking out of them. I had to solder those out, cut sites to the appropriate lengths and then solder those into the correct slots.
The image above is all of the chronodots with the wires in them.
The first part of installing the beagle bone was soldering wires onto the chronodots. When they came out of the package, the chronodots had little metal spikes sticking out of them. I had to solder those out, cut sites to the appropriate lengths and then solder those into the correct slots.
The image above is all of the chronodots with the wires in them.
This is an image of the chronodot installed onto the Beaglebone. Each wire had to go into a specific slot. In order to get the wires to fi, I had to shorten some of them and straighten the ends with pliers so that they would fit into their designated slots correctly.
After physically installing the chronodot, the work is far from over. Now that the hardware was in place, I had to configure the software so that the clock would record the time at which each data packet was collected. With Grant's guidance, I configured all of the settings on the clock, ran all of the necessary tests and did a fair amount of troubleshooting to configure the chronodot. The Beaglebone is a very basic computer, meaning that you access the information of the Beaglebone through a terminal. Terminal uses the coding language Unix. Consequently, I had to learn some basic Unix. In this image you can see my workspace during my chronodot configuration.
NOTE: If you have a mac, you can find the "Terminal" application in your applications folder. Here are some simple commands:
If you want to see all of the programs on your mac you can type: ls -al
If you want to know the date type: date
If you want to know who you are type: pwd
NOTE: If you have a mac, you can find the "Terminal" application in your applications folder. Here are some simple commands:
If you want to see all of the programs on your mac you can type: ls -al
If you want to know the date type: date
If you want to know who you are type: pwd
In my down time, I also took the battery out of a UPS (a backup power supply).