Build your own instruments! DIY data loggers with no custom PCBs

Umm, just to be clear, this is an open source science project and we are not selling anything - you have to get the parts yourself. Depending on where you buy them the logger costs about $10.

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Who would you say have been the primary course attendees? I.e. age, education, interest/field etc? How many of your loggers (of any version) would you say have been built and deployed in anger, would you say?

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Our primary audience is instructors of college undergrads. Their students can reasonably be expected to learn enough coding to adapt the device to different summer research projects. For example one student built more than a dozen of these loggers to monitor temperature in turtle nests. As to the rest of your question, Iā€™m not sure what you mean by ā€˜deployed in angerā€™? Why would anyone be angry about an open source science project?

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I mean, how many loggers would you guess were deployed because there actually was some data that needed to be logged, as opposed to as a learning experience for example, or for some other reason?

Thanks again for posting your loggers over the years.

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The EDU model described in that recent post is simplified specifically for learning experiences, so Iā€™d estimate less than a hundred (?) of those classroom models have been deployed by students outside of the courses for real world research projects. I can only estimate because Iā€™m not sure how many students have done research projects with our colleagues at other institutions who have also been using the EDU builds. And there have been different teaching models over the last 10 years, and other instructors tweak the design to their own course needs.

By comparison, just for Dr. Beddows research alone weā€™ve deployed about 500 self-built loggers over the last decade. And thatā€™s just one research project, and not counting all the commercial kit weā€™ve also deployed. But those research builds are more complicated on software side, and we make very rugged PVC housings for them which is quite time consuming. A typical installation gets 5-10 loggers with various different sensors, and a research site will have up to 10 installations. So you go through a lot of units with a yearly turnover of at least 15-25% because the get damaged, or simply age out.

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I can relate to the difficulty of making rugged housings.

Out of curiosity, what would you do if you had to make 100 units per week, could you modify the design to accomplish that? Say your task was to seriously compete with Hobo on price, features, availability. Could you come up with a plan?

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Seriously? Aside from the fact that the answers to these questions are already obvious to anyone who knows what they are doing - if you are only here to take ideas from people who are actually contributing to the open source hardware movement, so you can turn them into commercial products for your own profit, then you are in the wrong place.

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Iā€™m not asking you to come up with a plan, but whether a plan could be come up with. Yes I am serious in considering this for the Ubiquity 25 initiative. I would normally prefer a project which didnā€™t have to compete with an incumbent, just because itā€™s less work, but Iā€™m not averse to competition. Have a think. Or not.

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Ok, after reading that I can see that you meant well so I apologise for my harsh tone.
However, please remove our project from consideration for your initiative.

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Happy to see the new logger mentioned in the nerd press:

https://twitter.com/arduino/status/1736145734670451117

https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/12/15/the-e360-a-diy-classroom-data-logger-for-science-arduino-science/

However, interest on reddit is essentially zero. Even the response on r/ScienceTeachers is usually something like ā€œBut you didnā€™t explain what a ā€˜data loggerā€™ is or can be used for?ā€

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Much of the existing information on sensor calibration assumes a certain level of pre-existing equipment/capability. This creates a chicken & egg problem with white-paper procedures targeting accuracy that can not be achieved unless all the supporting parts of the system meet or exceed that same specification. From the beginning our project has been developing DIY solutions with that 80/20 point in mind and this NTC thermistor calibration hits that mark perfectly:

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