Projects

Quadcopter infra-red

Our first quadcopter flight with infra-red camera. This is a frame stripped from a video coming in to land. Looks like there is some vibration or interference from the motors blurring the image?

April 2015

Stacking infra-red images

By taking videos of stationary objects, extracting images, registering and stacking, we can improve the resolution of infra-red images.

April 2015

Solar powered, no battery monitoring of microclimate

This implementation has 1 phone and 1 gadidi board measuring temperature, humidity and light levels. The gadidi board is powered from the phone battery and the phone is topped up by the solar panel. The phone reads the gadidi board, sends data over 3G to the web for plotting and goes to sleep, waking after a time which is dependent on its battery level. This installation made it through 3 months of English winter on the Geography building roof with no extra power source.

Real-time monitoring of microclimate at Pompeii, Italy

Using a car battery and solar panel, we can monitor the environmental variables at Pompeii from Oxford.

Monitoring a distribution room

Cambridge company COHeat has implemented our technology to monitor 25 electricity meters in the distribution room of a block of social housing. Sending data over the 3G network at 10 second intervals.

Multi-channel logging in Turkey

Using multi-channel PIC breakour boards and Android phones we are monitoring temperature, humidity and light levels at an archaeological site at Gaziantep in Turkey. Data is sent over the Turkish phone network at 10 seconds intervals to our servers for analysis and display.

June 2014

Multichannel logging with Gadidi board

We designed and built the Gadidi board (our name) on the right. It polls 11 channels for a DC voltage (which are returned from various sensors) and sends to the phone over the microphone jack at set intervals from where it is sent to the web over 3G for archive and display. The phone sends messages to the processor on the Gadidi board via the same connection (using the headphone).

No battery Gadidi board

After problems with Lithium batteries (booster circuits etc) – I decided to make a simpler Gadidi board powered directly rather than off its own battery. This can run off 5V micro USB, from external batteries, solar panels or off the phone battery (as this one is doing). Most of the power is used by the LED showing the power is on. This one is sensing a current clamp around a power line and the RMS is being sent to the phone and then web every 5 seconds.

May 2014

Real time electricity monitoring

Android phones and simple electronics to create real time web-connected electricity monitors are being used at Lloyds Insurance head offices to monitor electricity of computer banks.

First Android App

Having spent a lot of time with Raspberry Pis, we have decided they are not stable enough and have a lot of intermittency problems with peripherals. So investigating the replacement of the Raspberry Pi with an Android phone as the linux machine. This is my first App – it uses GPS to estimate CO2 emissions from a car journey using time, speed and acceleration. It also display the proportion of time that acceleration or deceleration (and the powers associated with them) that exceed various threshholds.

Monitoring heat pipes

This Raspberry Pi (left) on the bench has been installed in the boiler plant on the right to measure 3 pipe temperatures on a steam network boiler room on the right. Data is uploaded for real time display over Ethernet.

Raspberry Pi vehicle computer monitoring

This Raspberry Pi application is monitoring the car’s computer via the OBD2 port Bluetooth connection, capturing data from a dashboard mounted GPS and camera and saving data to the SD card and a USB stick. The data uploads via wifi dongle at the end of the journey. Comparing OBD speeds versus GPS speeds integrated over journeys tells us about tyre pressures (ie diameters).