Authors: Jenna Lambert, Corban Larson

Mentors: Ozgur Yavuzcetin, Juk Bhattacharyya

Research projects have become multifaceted and multidisciplinary. With this development comes a need for specialists in specific fields involved in these projects. This is where we come in.

When you have a whole bunch of insanely smart people working on one project, you want them to keep pushing the project forward without any roadblocks. We can help make that happen by taking their questions, doing the research, and telling them what we find in the best way that makes sense. Without this, projects may be stalled for hours or days stuck on questions that we might be able to answer easily.

Our main project deals with monitoring landslides using Raspberry Pi computers and their associated peripheral devices. In this case that includes a strain gauge, 4 moisture sensors, and 6 temperature sensors. These devices will eventually be used for monitoring slope failure in real time as a part of a multimodal landslide monitoring device.

In addition we work with the code that is behind this hardware. We work to understand the existing code, add pieces that are needed, and translate the function of it so that the researchers understand it, how to run the code, and how to read the results.

One issue we ran into with using two Raspberry Pi computers to collect data was that the data at the same time stamp could not be compared as the Raspberry Pi computers do not save their clock time when shut down. To resolve this problem, we have looked into implementing battery powered real-time clock modules that will save the computer’s time through power cycles. In this presentation we describe how different technologies were researched and applied to assist with a multidisciplinary project with real-life application.