Engineering Update: There's an app for that!

Progress on the instrument is coming along. We have basic drivers finished, are working on application code for the instrument itself, and are working on the phone app and web interface.

Phone App

Current functionality is fairly limitted, but we have gotten over the startup hurdle of how to even program an android app so we are making great progress. Next steps for the app are working to integrate the actual pH measurement from the development kit.

 

Figure 1: Current alpha of the Android phone app showing the capability to upload the instrument data to the web server.

Web Interface

One of the things we are trying to do is create the capability to upload measured pH data to the cloud so that people can view the data on a google map. We are currently working through seeing if utilizing the google api for this still makes sense or if we want to move over to some other solution for plotting the data points on to a physical map like perhaps utilizing python and geopandas or similar. If anybody out there has more experience with this and knows how we should do it let us know!

 

Figure 2: Screenshot from the demo website showing the spoof data being displayed and the embedded google map above. Getting the point actually to show up on the embedded map is our current sticking point on this one.

Hardware Development

On the development kit side of things, the basic low-level drivers have reached a usable state and we are working on application level code and hope to quickly move into testing the actual pH measurement capabilities of the sensor on the bench! Will be sure to update with some preliminary data when we get it.

Next Steps: Physical Enclosure and Testing

Once the development kit has reached a good state with application code, creating a prototype enclosure and physical design is the next step.