Frogs is us!

Trip to Costa Rica to record a few frog calls for our CROAC product development. 

Installed at Macaw Lodge awaiting dusk and the frogs.

Start of semi-retirement

Well been a busy start since the 30 June end of consulting projects.

Managed to finish off the paper on the analysis of Galsbury bridge. Essentially to demonstrate that the SAIN unit can detect damage to a bridge arch. Just by listening to the sound of traffic passing over it.

Pretty cool or what! 

Check out the preprint - here - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361670463_Sounding_road_bridges_for_changing_structural_integrity

End of consulting projects!

 The last couple of years have been frantic. I was supposed to be retired but ended up on a couple of projects that ate up the time.

HOWEVER - as of yesterday.....

I have taken the decision to down tools on consultancy work and focus on stuff I want to do. That includes travel as well as finishing off the frog and bridge products we have built within the Advisory business.

Feels like I've retired - still 'working' but not getting paid for any of this - does that constitute retirement?

Anyway I need to run through what I can remember of the past year to try and not have a gap in the blog records.

Things that happened in 2021 and up to July in 2022 that I can remember - in bullet form,

1. Presentation of bridge monitoring and satellites at Manseds conference - first I'd done in quite a while.
2. Many trips to the 'Static' in Wales - excellent working breaks.
3. Roxy (our motorhome) trip with Amanda around Scotland - fantastic!
4. 1st and 2nd Glasbury bridge recordings taken with SAIN
5. Anniversary in LLandrindod Wells
6. Start work on Autonomous Minesweeper project for Thales.
7. Trip to Plymouth to see 'the boat'
8. Trip to Madrid with Richard to visit FOSSA Syatems and update on SAIN dev.
9. Christmas in the Static
10. Trip to Maui - WOW always great. Lahaina flat and worked through analysis of SAIN data with Stuart.
11. Trips to Bristol, Templecombe on Thales job
12. Trip to Crete on historical tour.
13. HS1 'wall' recordings with SAIN
14. 3rd Glasbury bridge recording
15. Salisbury and Bristol again to finish Thales job.
16. ENDED CONSULTANCY PROJECTS FOR NETWORK RAIL AND THALES IN JUNE

which probably doesn't mean much to anyone but myself. 

Now to refocus on SAIN.

2019 summary (very late - 2/10) - research entry that was missing

 

2020 - Year of the lockdown

 2020 - A strange year all in all - but major progress was made!

The potted history;

1. Project work rolled in throughout the year which was very good for business finances. 
2. Big ticket item is that we finally delivered the 25 Manchester Metrolink Safety Cases for Thales - after 5 years!
3. We took up residence in Sensor City offices in Liverpool. Then promptly got moved out to Liverpool Science Park while the SC offices were being 'expanded'. We will see if we ever move back?
4. We built our rail infrastructure simulator CLAMP Critical Location Acoustic Modification Platform and took many thousands of readings for various void and bridge configurations. 
5. We were planning of running some real field tests with SAIN but lockdown put a stop to that. So we ended up doing runs on CLAMP.
6. We secured a trial on road bridges in Powys which hopefully we will carry out this year - once we are out of the third lockdown period!
7. Ten SAIN units are now on delivery from Fossa for this project.
8. We are also firming up our bridge signature analysis and hope to be presenting the results in Mallorca at the Civil Comp conference in 2021.

So all in all not such a bad year. Our caravan in Wales has helped tremendously - many weeks were spent there planning and researching which otherwise would not have happened!

Onward and upward.....

2018 - where did it all go - just realised I didn't do one of these

I'm slipping - so bit late and a bit brief but this is what we were up to in 2018!

Busy, busy, busy.....the journey continues.

Name of project	Uncertainties at start	Issues arising during project	Further work	Ongoing/Ended
CROAC – app to analyse Costa Rican frog calls.	Could we develop an analysis package to run on mobile phone for identifying calls in the wild.	Difficulties with running complex analysis fast enough on mobile devices. Complexity of the background noise to the calls. Resulting in false calls.	Algorithm needs refining to help reduce false calls.	Ongoing
Rail infrastructure health monitoring.	Could the health of railway infrastructure (points, bridges, tunnels etc) be monitored through their changing sounds.	Difficulty getting access to real railway infrastructure. So we used a model railway to prove the concepts and think through the sensors required. Preliminary analysis showed simplest analysis would be to focus on bridges.	Need to develop sensor to a level where it can be left for a period of time in the field. Need to prove we can identify signals for real railway bridges.	Ongoing
PACE – air-conditioning control system.	Could a new air-conditioning approach be controlled using the new LoRA radio communication protocol and a simple control device.	Control of the peltier cooler was non-trivial requiring significant hardware modifications. LoRA communication setup proved less effective that originally anticipated.	May look to use more standard communication methods.	Ended – proved LoRA is not right for this system.
Wheel slip analysis	Could a big-data approach be used to analyse rail wheel slip occurrences.	Access to appropriate data was difficult to obtain. Data was provided by Siemens in the end but then we ended up with too much data. Effort then had to be expended refining this data.	Initial analysis has demonstrated the technique. Larger data sets are now needed to refine the algorithms.	Ongoing
FOSSA – satellite swarm communications. Effectively he ‘glue’ to communicating and transmitting data from remote monitoring devices using cheap satellite systems.	Could a cube-sat be developed to use the new LoRA communication protocol. Built and launched at low cost.	Difficulties encountered applying the LoRA protocol to the satellite communication time window. Power consumption on the satellite required special design of solar cells.	The cube sat now needs final build then tested and commissioned for flight	Ongoing – launch planned for Sept 2019

Pico-Satellite coming along

Nothing to do with me mind - project is one of my trusted advisors projects.

Check out @FossaSys on Twitter for full info.

However, its a great learning ground for my Fortran revival - learning by osmosis about Arduino's and LORA with a bit of programming thrown in (but not too much mind).

Box of tricks just arrived for the schools workshops that are planned to take place over coming months - code to be flown on the satellite.

How cool is that.....beep, beep, beep....

The revival is revived!