A month at MakerBay with ScoutBots — Marine Litter Detective
During the month of July 2017, I did my internship with Cesar Harada at ScoutBots Protei and contributed in the projects such as WWF’s Marine Litter Detective going on at MakerBay. I had been working on Marine Litter Detective and Protei_Rpi from March to June and I wanted to continue the work throughout the summer. Thus, I was super excited when Cesar called me on board to collaborate on the next version of Protei (now called Protei Rohak v12.0). This post traces my journey at ScoutBots and MakerBay, the things I learnt from the amazing people and the projects around me and serves as a documentation for all the undertaken work.
tl;dr : I made this webpage for the data visualization part of Marine Litter Detective and I gave this talk about the project at an event organized by the Consulate General of Switzerland in Hong Kong at MakerBay. In the last two weeks, Cesar Harada and I developed v12.0 of Protei — Protei Rohak. The design and fabrication of the boat was handled by Cesar, while the electronics and code was formulated by me. Some videos and pictures of Protei Rohak can be found here. I wrote about the last two weeks here.
Week 1
The first week went in completing the data visualization part for Marine Litter Detective. Check out the final webpage here:
http://www.marinelitterdetective.net/
We experimented with a lot of baselayers for the Leaflet Map. An initial idea was to include a Windytv layer so that we could visualize the ocean currents, temperature, wind speed etc. in real time:
After a few days of using the Windytv layer, we realized that after adding the drifter tracks, it became hard to focus on the drifters. We decided to remove the Windytv layer thereafter.
I also finalized minute details about the user interface of the Leaflet Map such as the device list scroll, metadata of the drifters, auto focus, etc.
GPXPY is a great Python library for building, use and analysis of GPX files.
I also completed Search Engine Optimization for the webpage, and wrote articles on what I learnt from my experience with SEO here and here
Week 2
In the second week, I presented the Marine Litter Detective project to students of China Hardware Innovation Camp (CHIC) at an event organized by the Consulate General of Switzerland in Hong Kong at MakerBay. The slides and the video of my presentation are available here and here.
I also discovered something absolutely amazing during this week. On of our drifters, which was launched from MakerBay itself, reached the northern part of Taiwan — about a 1000KM away from Hong Kong.
For some perspective, a 1000KM is about 57 trips on foot from Kennedy Town to Yau Tong in Hong Kong. A 1000KM is also equal to 3 trips on foot from Washington DC to New York City, that’s how much our drifter traveled in a month.
