Observed many polystyrene pieces by the lake. Though individually they were easy to overlook at a quick glance given their small size, there were clusters that formed, even landing well above the rocks forming a water wall. Here’s some photos of the observations:
Hypothesis: Watching water flow routes during the thaw could help us better plan for heavy rainfall events to avoid additional sediment and coastal erosion.
The thaw is starting here. We can observe the erosion in action. Here’s what it looks like at a beach.
Erosion path at the top of the beach
Mid way pointWater flowing downhill
Midway point downhill
Draining to the lakeVideo showing this erosion path
There is ice and snow underneath some of the sand layer. It will be interesting to see how the melting of those layers will contribute to the additional erosion.It will also be interesting to see what the restoration action will be based on this. At the same park, here is a different location, though it is not draining to the lake as rapidly.
Water in a big puddle 
Exit location of the big puddle to the top of the beach
Path of erosion on the beach
Why is this interesting?
If we had more precise data on where the water does travel based on the soil, then…
Join our founder Erin at TEDxOttawa tonight (virtually) sharing stories of how people and robots working together can help solve environmental problems. In her talk will be video clips of the robots, such as Bowie! If you want to join in, tickets are available here.
This is part of the global climate countdown initiative by TED. TEDxOttawa is running 4 events in this series: Community, Businesses, Governments, What’s Next.
It’s great to have this opportunity to share what we as a community have accomplished with the robots. There’s a breakout session after the presentations, which will be a great place to discuss more and hopefully draw up some more interest in Codename Terrapulse and more of our newer projects.
See ya there!
The AR draggable power-up functionality has now reached a stable state that’s good enough for a version 0.1. Updates to the code made it more modular for multiple markers, for 3 element power ups, and now the power up rectangle that is placed onto the marker knows when it has done so. The power up rectangles only appear when there’s a marker in view. The next step will be to download the libraries that are used and make sure it works with the latest version of everything. After that will be making some new markers, and then merging the code with MQTT. Also, catch-up has to be done for the previous logs… oops. Well, by the time this is posted, the previous 5 are now caught up too.
Quick tech log to note that the instance is back up and running again, and the AWS credits missing was resolved! Did some high level searching on what next to tackle with that, and it will be learning more about Route 53, DNS, SSL certificate manager, and React Native. This will come a bit later though, the biggest priority at hand is to make this prototype work.