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Welcome to the Page by Paul
I'm in my third year as a Physics and Mathematical Economics double major at Colorado College. I was born in Denver, but my folks live just outside of Boston in a town called Wayland where I call home. At school I'm involved in many things from being vice president and treasurer of Fiji, a fraternity on campus, to working part time at the computer help desk. Thanks to Val I was invited to come on this trip in the San Juan Islands and help to produce a close circuit automated camera system.
The project I'm working on is simply acquiring video footage of Orcas. Unfortunately
this project is not so simple. To demonstrate the complexity of this project
I will start with a whale swimming (and hopefully making noise) in the water
to the west of San Juan Island. The noise the whale makes will be picked up
by our hydrophones. The hydrophones will then send the signal to our research
base, where computers will collect the data and calculate a position where the
whale is. This is a very complicated process using some fancy Fourier
analysis to calculate time delays. Once the time delays are calculated it
is simple geometry to acquire a position. Another computer will use that position
to send out four signals to a camera and tripod mount. Two signals will tell
the tripod to align its self at a specific altitude and azimuth. The other two
signals will tell the lens to zoom and focus. These signals go into a microprocessor
called an OOPic. The OOPic
is an object oriented programmable microprocessor that sends out signals. These
signals then go through a circuit board Winn and I designed
to convert the signal into proper voltages that will move the mount and lens.
Once the camera is aligned properly the computer will begin recording the video
footage. This footage will be stored on an external computer hard drive. Then
researchers around the world can view this footage in an attempted to understand
the mysterious behavior of the Killer Whale.
