Viper Project 2014: 21cm Detector

Today is the last day of research! We have mixed emotions! It has been a lot of fun and a great experience to work on our projects and learn with each other! Today we were pleasantly surprised and were able to test our 21 cm detector thanks to Dr. Hassel! He found a new way to connect it to the tv dongle so we were able to get a reading of the microwaves as shown below in our pictures.

We were still not able to find out how to load our webcam pictures or video to a public website. So, as of right now you can only view them if you are on Siena Air.

We had a great time working with everyone on the Viper Project! Thanks to all the professors for your help!

Day 18

This is a picture that our camera took at night. This means that as long as there is some light on the telescope, you will be able to see what is occurring on the telescope.

Today we figured out how to start and stop motion at a certain time each day. We also were able to delete files that were more than a day old. The code we used is shown below.

Tomorrow is the last day. :-( Unfortunately, we will not be able to test the 21 cm detector again this week because a pin broke that connects it to the TV dongle. We hope to find more information on how to upload pictures to a public website and to write out instructions on how we got our webcam working.

Day 17

Today we went to Union College to test the 21cm Detector. When we arrived, the Raspberry Pi would not load. The SD card seems to be corrupted. We were able to run the program on a laptop. We kept getting a peak that did not move when switching wavelengths. Our second computer crashed and would not reload Debian. We will test again. We are now reinstalling the program on the new SD card and hope to have it working soon. Pictures from today will be up soon.

Even in the rain we managed to place our 21 cm detector in the telescope at Union.

Unfortunately, our test was not successful. We got closer and closer each time we went to Union so we are hoping the next time it is tested it works!

Day 16

Exciting morning for us!!!!! We now have the video streaming and pictures uploading online! If you are on SienaAir test it out!!!!
Video: http://10.69.97.113:8081
Pictures: http://10.69.97.113:8080

YAY!

This is what the archive of photos looks like. It is accessing the folder that apache2 creates for online. The problem is that the raspberry pi has to be on in order to access the photos. You also have to be on the SienaAir network to access the photos. We are working on editing a cron tab that allows you to delete photos in the archive after a certain number of days. We should be able to go for a long time before the images need to be deleted. That's because today we left motion running and took over 4000 photos and used up only .1GB out of the 8GB on the SD card. We are also trying to access our raspberry pi from a public IP. The hope is that we will be able to view the last snapshot that was taken on the Siena website. If we can not figure out how to do that, we can try and convert the images in python or matlab. Tonight we are going to run the camera of the raspberry pi by the window starting at 10pm. We turned on auto brightness and hope that the camera will be able to take picture outside at night well.

Day 15

Today we made some progress and found that cron job worked. We were very excited to see that cron job could run motion whenever we wanted after it not working for a couple of days. We high fived for excitement! It doesn't take much to make us happy! Since we got it to work, the web cam got us in action!

We also tested our 21 cm detector to see if it read any waves. This is a picture of what the graph looked like before we tested it so that we could see if there was a change when we turned on the 10.5 giga hertz microwave optic source, as shown below.

I know the picture quality isn't the best, but you can see that the graph did change, so our 21 cm detector is reading something! This was very exciting for us to see the graph change.

Tomorrow we hope to figure out how to send pictures from the raspberry pi to a website. We are planning to go to union on Wednesday to test our 21 cm detector with their telescope. It will be our third visit so we are hoping that the third time's the charm!

Day 14

Today we returned to Union College with our Linux server to try and run the detector. We were not able to get it fully running. We did go to the telescope to see how will mount it once we get the program working properly. We also began to try to run a crontab for the camera to monitor viper. If we can get the code to run properly we should be able to email the photos that the camera take to an email that we created. We should also be able to delete the extra photos that are on the SD card.

Day 13

Well, we can't all say we worked as hard as Joey, but here is what we did today....

We helped put the temporary mirror in place for viper.

I think Kenny would have liked to stay inside, working on his All Sky Cam.

We also made a new webpage. We hope to make the video come up on the webpage so that anyone can access it anywhere, not only through SienaAir on campus. We made the webpage because we realized that Dropbox will not work and we are going to try to automatically upload our pictures onto this new website. Hopefully tomorrow we will make some progress and accomplish some of our goals!

Day 12

Today we figured out how to upload folders to Dropbox. We have to manually upload the photos, and cannot get it to upload automatically. We are thinking that maybe we can find a way to write a python code that will allow us to run the motion command and upload command at the same time. We were also able to edit the motion command, so now the video had a ViperCam label. By editing motion, we were also able to find a way to take a picture every N seconds. We also had to try and get python running. The raspberry pi however was complaining that "No module named pygtk. We were able to install it. When we attempted to run ./dropbox.py start -i, the following error appeared.

Day 11

Today we went to Union College to try and test the detector. We were not able to test it today because we did not have a USB Linux computer. We will try to test it later this week. We were able to upload a photo to Dropbox but are still having difficulty uploading automatically.

Day 10

Today was a productive and exciting day.

This is the picture of when we were able to successfully get the raspberry pi connected to the internet by its ip address.

This is one of the first images that were captured when we got the stream from the camera to the internet. We were able to figure out the port number. As long as the camera is running, anyone on the Siena network can access the live camera feed from the ip address and the port number. Any time motion is detected, the webcam takes a photo and stores it to the raspberry pi.

Since the camera will be on the Viper telescope, we had to make sure that we were detecting motion outside. We were able to adjust the settings of motion to put on an auto brightness. There are other settings in motion that will allow us to change the number of pictures that the webcam takes.

From here we need to see how far the camera will detect motion from. We need to test wether or not the camera will detect motion from Dr. Weatherwax's office. If it is not able to detect motion from the office, we need to find a way to mount the camera outside and find a way to remotely power the raspberry pi. No matter where the camera ends up being placed, we need to figure out how to upload the photos to dropbox which we were having difficulty with last week. Tomorrow we travel to Union College to test our detector.

Day 9

Today we continued work on the webcam. We have run into errors of not being able to find package. i may have found a way to stream it through the ip address. We believe that if we can properly locate the ip address on one of the school computers, we will be able to see the video feed that is coming from the webcam. We plan to visit Union College to test the detector on their radio telescope.

Day 8

Today we continued work on getting the webcam to work. We were able to get the motion detector running on the webcam. We are unable to locate where the image is being sent. We are trying to send the images that are captured by the webcam to a dropbox for storage. We are having difficulty downloading dropbox however.

We also found that sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf allows us to adjust things such as the contrast and brightness. It also talks about the capabilities of motion. While in that file, I was able to find that there is such a thing as video4linux. I hope that this will allow us to stream the video that the camera finds.

Day 7

We made some progress today and were able to take a picture outside! You can now at least tell what is seen outside. We still have to play around with the settings because it is not completely clear, but hopefully we can figure that out soon. Now our next task is to set up a feed to a website so that every time the webcam takes a picture, people can see them just by looking online.

Although we were able to get the picture outside, the raspberry pi is still not recognizing the usb camera properly. We can only get it to take a picture if we type the line fswebcam -p YUYV test.jpeg. If the camera was properly being recognized then we would not need the -p YUYV in the code. We are also trying to get the camera to stream a video and detect motion. We found a few websites that will allow us to do this hopefully with relative ease. But for a lot of these codes to work, we have to ensure the camera is recognized properly.

We also got all the parts to finish the 21 cm detector so that we can test it at Union on Monday to see if it works! This is a picture to show all the parts put together.

Day 6
We are currently waiting for the last few pieces to complete the detector. In the afternoon, we began to work on the webcam to watch the viper telescope. We were trying to fix the brightness on the camera. When we first plugged in the camera, the brightness was proper for anything inside of the room. We then tried to move the camera closer to the window and got a white screen. We tried plugging in the camera to a Windows computer and the program would allow us to change the setting of brightness, contrast, tint, ect. When we brought the camera back, we were able to get the following image when positioning the camera to outside the window.

This is the image that we were able to take outside the window. The different color is the grass.

We tried to readjust the brightness some more but kept running into the same problem. The camera has an auto-adjust feature for brightness and seems to have difficultly going back to normal brightness.

This is a picture from the camera point outside. The white glare is outside.

This is a picture of the room after trying to take a picture outside.

Tomorrow we are going to try and find a way to take the picture outside. We think that the reflection from the glass may be causing problems with the built in auto-adjust feature. We also need to find out why we can no longer adjust the code we have to auto take the picture. We also hope to have the last few pieces for the detector so we hope that we can complete it.

Day 5

Happy Friday!!

We started today working on de-soldering the copper tape flap and de-solder the stub from the cakepan.

We then had to cut the coil to the proper length and strip the wire so that we could solder the wire to itself. Above is the stub properly soldered to the detector. Until lunch we continued to research the function of the 21 cm detector.

Since we are still waiting for parts to finish the detector we began to work on programing a video camera to watch the telescope to make sure no one damages it. We were able to find a code that takes a photo on a given interval of time. Below is a line of code that captures a single image.

Next week we hope to program this to connect to arduino to take pictures when there is motion around the telescope. Also, we want to hook up the camera to post pictures to a website so that anyone can access these pictures.

Day 4
Today we did what we thought to be the final touch ups on the detector. Dr. Cummings however helped us to see that we need to fix the cable that acts as the 1/4 wavelength stub. We now have to desolder the cable from the cake pan to do this. Figure 1 shows the part of the detector that needs to be desoldered. Figure 2 shows how the wire should be cut. Figure 3 shows what the stub should look like. Dr. Hassel also found something that needs to be fixed. We soldered one end of the copper tape to the cake pan that should not be soldered down. The part that needs to be fixed is shown in figure 4. The rest of the day was spent trying to better understand what radio astronomy studies and what purpose our detector serves.

Figure 1: This is the cable that has to be fixed then re-soldered properly.

Figure 2: This is how the cable should have looked when we attached it.

Figure 3: This is the way that we have to solder the cable. The inside wire has to connect to the outside of the wire on one end. The other end needs to be connected like the right side of the image shows. Drawing courtesy of Dr. Hassel

Figure 4: This is the part that was soldered down that should not have been. We must desolder that tomorrow.

Today we made some finishing touches on our low noise amplifier assembly. Then we spent the day learning some background information on radio astronomy and radio waves. Radio astronomers study regions in space that cannot be seen in visible light. It is the study of objects in space that give off radio waves. We are able to find the location, density, and motion of hydrogen gas in the universe because of radio waves. We hope to start work on the signal amplifier next to connect it to the low noise amplifier so that we can test it.

Day 3- May 21

Today we started off by drilling a few more holes into our cake pan and mounting sheet so that our antenna would match up correctly with the low noise amplifier. Below is a picture of some of the parts that are being used to build the 21 cm detector.

This shows the cake pan, which the low noise amplifier will go on the outside of, the antenna, which is a Styrofoam tube with copper tape wrapped around it, and the yellow square is pc board that will act as an insulator. The Styrofoam tube with copper tape will go on top of the yellow pc board inside of the cake pan.

Next we needed to solder one piece of the copper tape to the SMA connector and another piece to the cake pan. Then we soldered a small cable to the SMA connector and inside of the cake pan as well.

This is currently what the stand looks like. We still need to finish securing the mounting for the antenna. We also have to fix some of the soldering inside the cake pan. We then need to find a way to test the antenna to see if it works. If it does not work, we will need troubleshoot. We also want to find a way to clarify the directions to build the antenna. We will also try to better understand what a 21 cm detector actually does.

Day 2
Today we began to work on the antenna.

After talking with Joe, we adjusted the low noise amplifier, as shown above, allowing more room inside of it.

After checking the low noise amplifier, we had to find where the hole needed to be in the antenna. We later found that we still need to drill more holes in order to properly mount the low noise amplifier. The digram of where the holes should be was confusing in nature, thus we did not drill the proper holes. Below is us drilling the mounting sheet.

Tomorrow we will work on drilling the proper holes in the antenna(cake pan). We also have to cut the board that will help to insulate the antenna and do more soldering that has to attach the Styrofoam to the pan.

Day 1
Today we built the low noise amplifier for the 21cm detector. We had to drill two holes in the waterproof case shown below so that we can connect the low noise amplifier to the antenna.