Hey everyone, here’s another quick update for you! I spent some time yesterday adding in the barometric sensor to the shield, refining and testing the code, and then doing a data collection test by driving around for an hour. At the current point in time, I feel that I can call this “Milestone 1”. So far I have gotten data logging working for the GPS unit and Barometer, and have the entire device running off the batteries. After the changes our unit now looks like this:

In addition, this is the new output format. Much cleaner then the last one, eh?

After collecting all of this data, I wanted a simple way to visualize it against the location. I had heard that it is possible to put it into Google Earth, so after doing some research I came upon a website to convert CSV to KML. After experimenting with it a bit, I came up with the resulting file:

The really cool thing about this format, is that I can click on any data point and see all the information from the sensors at that specific point. This will get really handy as we add more sensors, and will be REALLY cool once we get the data from the balloon.

Finally, I imported the collected data into MATLAB. This is incredibly easy thanks to MATLAB’s ability to parse CSV files. I need to do a better job in the future of using the GPS time data for the X-Axis, but for this simple experiment I just assumed the device sampled every second.

That wraps up everything that I have worked on. Hoped you enjoyed this update, and look forward to the next one!