I didn't send anything to use for mounting the solar panels. With some experiments you never know what to pack and when you do send something it's usually the wrong thing. Most of the time it's just easier to improvise. This time improvisation produced the structure below out of a couple of coconut tree logs, a couple of 2x4s and some nails. I never would have thought to have sent that stuff.
Below is a picture of the standard package of equipment at each station for this experiment. The battery and the disk drive are along the top. The charge controller (the black box), the controller box for the sensor (the grey item partially inside the white coil of wire), and the white GPS antenna are all in the middle. The digitizer is along the bottom. The recording equipment for this experiment was the Quanterra Q330 and its recording unit (read hard drive) a baler. The solar panel wires snuck out through a slot between the box and the cover in the lower left-hand corner of the box.
Not that we thought we did a bad job the day before, but we decided to open the vault back up and just double check the alignment of the sensor for fun.
While I kept the string pointing north and south Matt marked the two points on the edge of the barrel where the string crossed.
We used a straight item, in this case a piece of rebar, to align the sensor with the marks that Matt made on the barrel. The handle on the top of the sensor gets aligned to north and south. There is a brass and a silver point near the bottom of the sensor that indicates which direction is which. You can fix a backward sensor's data in software when you process the data if you get it wrong.
Finished! One and a half down. Two and a half to go. We wrapped the station box in a tarp to keep the sun directly off of it in hopes of keeping it a bit cooler than the boiling point of aluminum.
That's Leoso and Matt standing next to the gate we tied up against the cistern to keep the local chickens out.
2014-08-03