So this week has been the week of logger-fixing, with me trying to shrink the footprint of my previous logger while getting better data from the one I’ve been using. Most of the decision (actually, all) to move loggers has been based on the need to adjust what I’ve been doing to fit the new boards I’ve made, which will be sweet once it all comes together. Plus, the new uSD dude has a real-time clock built in — a two-fer!
This is all a huge step up, technically and aesthetically, from the logger Jenkins and I made for Computers for the Rest of You last semester (though that was a great start!).
As I blabbered about in a previous post, I’m working on taking this platform:
And putting it out where people can use it. Part of that has been going on for the past two weeks or so, with my little monitor hanging out in the ITP lounge:
and 
(This may be the first chance I’ve had to show how damn small this thing is)
It’s been great to watch, actually — I’ve explained it to a handful of people, and they’ve explained it to a handful of others, but it’s still largely a blinky light to most. However, it seems to work — once they know how it works, people will of course run over and set it off on purpose, but then they’ll often look up after loud noises to see the effect it’s had on the logger. Better yet, half the time I’ll catch people looking at it in surprise when it finds something not-as-loud that they hadn’t noticed.
So, for now, the physical side holds and is doing well. The data side is coming along, though slower. The logger, after some wrangling, outputs straight ASCII values of the ports it’s reading, which after a quick find-and-replace to get rid of spaces, comes up nicely in graphing programs.
to 
I’m still trying to find a better way to deal with visualization, but for now Apple Numbers is doing an okay job with the smaller sets.
Though I should note that trying to read the whole initial 40k-entry set I fed it caused it to eat up 5 gigs of hard drive space and crash. Ooops.
I’ve also done up a quick Processing app that can read the data coming out of the Arduino side when patched into a computer:
and 
Part of the question is to see if it helps or hurts the cause — will detailed metrics help people quantify their experiences or just add to the hassles and distractions? Time will tell!
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