Moving Along

We've started to ramp up our work the past few days. Our focus right now is to establish out sites and get the monitoring operational. There are frequent power outages here and one of our main concerns was having an uniterupted power source for the equipment. The task yesterday was to find such a solution. Arun, an assistant we hired from the India Institute of Science, and I set out to the market area of Bangalore. It was a bit tricky with two non-Hindi speakers (Arun is from Karala and speaks a different language) but we managed to find a near exact replica of the external battery packs available with the equipment. Well, we actaully had to have them made, but that is the great thing about much of the developing world... as long as you find the right people, you can pretty much have anything fabricated that you desire. So we took a 6V battery from one shop and had another shop sodder it in parallel with the existing battery pack, then connect it with the equipment and viola... we tripled our battery life. Its still a bit suspect, but testing the next few days should work out the bugs.

We had a very similar experience with the metal fabricators who built our security box for the monitor. We went in, described what we wanted, waited a day and hoped the understood what we asked for. To our surprise, the box is nearly exactly what we wanted.

These are two issues Julian and I were worried would consume much of our time here and it appears we pending solutions to both. Next step is setting up the sites and getting some real time data.