Back in ‘05 when I hiked from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail, I carried a little device called an iButton. This little device contains essentially three things: a clock, a bit of memory and a thermometer. It’s waterproof, accurate to 0.1 degree Celsius, and is about the size of five dimes stacked one upon another. There are a bunch of silly things you can do with these, but what I chose to do with mine was to have it record the temperature every hour on the hour for the entire time I was hiking, with the idea being to get some good data about the temperature out there on the PCT.
All in all, you can figure that the temperature was recorded 24 times a day for about 150 days, for an astounding 3600 data points, and about 150 oscillations from the daytime high to the nighttime low. I’ve spent some time working with the data, and it’s pretty much impossible to make much use of….unless you write a program to interpret it. You can see it for yourself if you’re interested.
Well, as fate should have it, I am currently enrolled in a Java programming class, and I have the option of doing a final project of my own choosing. Having not put this data to good use has been a burden on my soul for a couple of years now, and I’ve decided to make my final project an applet that will allow a user to plot this data on a graph for any date range and any time range that they choose (e.g. 5pm to 10pm for September 20th to 23rd).
Once this is done, I will attempt to post it here, but here’s the question to you dear reader, do you have any suggestions as to features that you would be interested in seeing in an applet of this sort? Thoughts?
I’m quite excited about getting this info out there. Finally.
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