Author: Luke Miller
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100 years of sea surface temperature data from Hopkins Marine Station
Caretakers at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California have been taking the temperature of the surface seawater on the beach every morning at 8:00 AM for over 100 years. In a new open access paper, Larry Breaker and myself run through some methods to fill in the gaps in that data set, look at…
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Little screws
This is for no one else’s benefit but my own. These are the little screws from McMaster-Carr that are useful for screwing into the mounting holes in Pelican cases and similar knock-off watertight gear boxes.
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Accessing NOAA tide data with R (updated 2021)
It’s been a decade since I wrote a script to retrieve observed tide height data from NOAA’s CO-OPS server, which lets you grab up to a month of tide data for a given tide station at a time. In that time, they’ve migrated over to a new server and slightly different API, so it’s probably…
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Open Wave Height Logger paper
After a prolonged period of development, we’ve finally put out an article in Limnology and Oceanography: Methods detailing our Open Wave Height Logger project (OWHL). This paper walks through the motivations for the project (low-cost, long-duration water pressure data logging so that we can know what the waves were like at a field site) and…
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Salvaging a microSD card
Opening up a watertight box and finding this inside is never encouraging. The toxic soup trapped inside the box wasn’t doing any favors to the batteries or electronics, and the data logger was dead on arrival. But we pulled the microSD card to see if there was anything that could be salvaged off of it.…
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Updated OWHL assembly video
I have revised the Open Wave Height Logger electronics assembly video as of March 2020 to include narration (uh-oh) and more information about the programming process and error codes. This video outlines the entire assembly process for soldering the components to the 3 circuit boards of the OWHL Revision C design. The current designs and…
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R as.Date() and time zones
Here’s a fun quirk to watch out for when playing around in R with POSIX time values and converting them to dates. I’ll start by creating a time variable, in the POSIXct class, and set it to use my current time zone, which is Pacific Daylight Time (PST8PDT). If I then wanted to turn this…
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Building a new bivalve gape sensor datalogger
It’s construction time in the laboratory again. This time we’re building shell gape sensors for oysters, based on a datalogger design derived from the MusselTracker datalogger I designed a few years back. In this new design, we can have up to 16 gape sensors attached to one datalogger, though we’ll just have 10 to start…
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Dynamic measurements of black oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani) predation on mussels (Mytilus californianus)
Myself and co-author Wes Dowd have a new paper out in the journal Invertebrate Biology detailing a set of observations we made of black oystercatchers attacking a set of mussels that were part of an experiment we were running. The mussels in our experiment were wearing a set of sensors, including an internal temperature sensor,…
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Preparing for the upcoming field season
Production is ramping up for the imminent start of two field experiments in Alaska and California. In both cases we’ll be manipulating tide pool temperatures using heaters to slightly raise water temperatures during low tide. To get ready for that, I’ve been working on soldering and assembling the custom circuit boards that will handle the…