Measure. Analyze. Learn.
One of the features of the LabQuest 2 is
that it has built-in GPS, Global Positioning System.
And, it allows me to track where I am on the globe.
And so, I'm going to do a couple of things with this.
I'll do a run, where I'm just going to walk around in the field
behind me, and collect some data.
And then, we'll go down to a stream, and maybe,
make some measurements with a sensor other than the GPS,
and have the two things combined here.
So, it's a built in sensor, so one of the things
I have to do is to activate it.
It doesn't default to coming on,
because you don't necessarily want it there.
To do this, I go up under "Sensors", and right here it says,
"Sensor Setup…", and so I go to sensor setup.
And then, here you'll see the list of the various channels here.
And then, you have the internal sensors here.
And, what I want to do is activate the "GPS" and I say, "OK".
It's going to go to the meter here.
And so, right now it's trying to find the satellites.
And so, its got "Latitude" and "Longitude" there.
And, it hasn't found the satellites yet.
And, we can know that, that we've activated this,
because If you look down in this part of the screen,
you'll see there is little globe, with an X on it.
And so, that indicates that the GPS is activated,
and that it's currently trying to find satellites.
And, one of the things that can happen is,
it can take several minutes if you've never used it before,
in that position, or that location.
It has to talk to all these different satellites,
and it could take a little while for that to happen.
Now, while I wait for this to locate the satellites,
one of the things I would like to do is
to change the contrast of the screen.
Because we're outside, on a sunny day,
it can be a little bit difficult to see the screen.
So, the LabQuest 2 has the ability for a high contrast screen.
And so, I'm going to go here, and go to the little house icon.
And, under the "Preferences", I need to go to "Light & Power".
And, I want to change this to "High Contrast".
So, I do the high contrast mode, and you can see the
colors change there a little bit. I go, and we go back.
And so, we're still waiting for the satellites there.
While were waiting for this to find the satellites,
let's take a look at our default mode.
It's a "Time Based", meaning right now,
it's going to look at the position as a function of time.
1 sample per second, and it's going to do that for 3600 seconds.
Well, that's an hour, and so if I hit start,
it's just going to do a time collection of that.
So, its now found our latitude and longitude.
We have a signal there.
I'm going to wait for it to get a little bit stronger.
One thing you can do, if you're going to use this with students
out in the field, if you want to, kind of,
speed up the process is that if you've ever been to that spot,
maybe you're doing around the school yard,
you could go and activate it first and then let it find that, and
then generally it will tend to find the satellites a little quicker.
Its found us here, our latitude and longitude,
I'm ready to hit collect, so I press the collect button.
And then, I go on a little walk.
And I press stop, to stop collection.
And there, we have the graph of my path.
And we could take a look at our graph.
And the default here is latitude versus longitude.
And, you can see my path as I walked around the field there.
There's some other options when you do this.
Is that if you tap on the axis of the graph itself,
you can see that you can do, "Time", "Latitude", "Longitude",
"Altitude", "Speed", "Direction" on the various axes.
And so, I can change that if I want to.
So maybe, if I wanted to do a graph of, say,
speed versus my time, I could do that.
And, it's kind of going up and down here a little bit.
You know, as I'm going around I may be moving the
LabQuest in my hand, and so when it actually gets the speed
at that point, it may not be all that steady.
And, I'm not going all that fast,
and so, it's kind of jumping around there.
But then I could go back and maybe if I wanted to do
latitude versus time, or longitude versus time, I can do that.
But, of course, latitude versus longitude,
gives us the actual position where we are on the planet.
So, I mentioned two different use cases.
We did the one where I walked around in the field.
And now we're interested in looking at
discrete points, maybe in this case, along a stream.
So, we could measure our latitude and longitude with our GPS,
along with a sensor.
And so, we could do the two things, and so we can keep track
of where we are, when we do our collection.
And, like we did before, I've got to set this up.
And so, I've got the device running.
I need to go to my "Sensor Setup…"
And, I'm going to have it activate the "GPS", I'll say "OK".
And so, now it's going to find where we are.
It'll take a second to be able to do that.
And, what we'll see, is at first it's going to go to the same
defaults that we had earlier where it will be a time based graph.
But, that's not what we want.
And, what will happen, is when I plug in the
temperature sensor, it's actually going to
change the setting at that point.
Actually, I'm going to go ahead and plug that in at this point.
Now, if we look up into our upper right corner now,
the default with this sensor connected is what we call
"Selected Events".
And this would do our collection by event number.
So, if I went to one location, it would do a location.
And then I could go to another one, another one, another one.
And, it would be location 1, 2,3,4, and whatnot.
I could use this, but there is a setting on the LabQuest that's
really nice, it's called the "Data Matrix".
And, the data matrix allows us to
measure multiple sites, on multiple days, with multiple sensors,
and keep track of this matrix of data.
And so, that would be very appropriate
for what we're going to do.
So, I need to go and change my collection mode
to this data matrix.
And so, to do this, I'm going to go to mode.
And, I go, instead of "Selected Events",
I'm going to do "Data Matrix".
And so, right now it's defaulting to Site 1, Day 1.
And so, I'm just going to start this, and say "OK".
It will "Automatically increment [numbers]" for us,
So, I'm going to say, "OK".
And so, we changed it to Data Matrix.
And now, what will happen is we make the
different measurements, we can add different sites
as we go along here.
So, I'm ready to make my first measurement.
So, I'm going to press collect there.
So, I press my little arrow, just like we've always done.
And, what will happen now, is that it moves over here,
and it says "Day 1", "Site 1", and so I'm ready to go here.
So, I'm going to say, "Continue".
And when I do this, I'm going to end up with my meter here.
And so in Channel 1, I have my temperature sensor.
And then, over here it says, "Latitude", and "Longitude".
And, what will happen is, if I want to save the value,
I'm actually going to tap, to save that value.
And at that point, it will actually make that measurement.
So, I'm ready to do that. So, I'm going to bend down here.
I'll take the temperature of the water,
and it will record our location.
So, I'm just going to stick that into the water.
And now, I'm going to tap on the meter to do that.
So, I tap on the latitude and longitude.
I tap on the meter for temperature.
And, it is now saved that.
And, I'm ready to go to another site, so I'll do "Change".
I'm going to do "Add Site".
So, it’s automatically going to increment to "Site 2".
And, I do "Continue".
And, I will move on to another site.
So, I'm just going to walk down the stream.
And so, that way I can do temperature and
location, further down the stream.
This one, "Continue", and…
wait for that to stabilize,
latitude and longitude look good, they're stable.
Temperature seems to have stabilized there.
Tap the meter to do that one.
"Change", and I'm ready to go to another site.
And, let's get this site here.
Sensor in the water.
Stick it in the gravel this time a little bit.
"Continue"…
My latitude and longitude look stable, so I tap the meter.
that collects that one.
Temperature looks stable, do that one.
And, now I'm done.
And so, at this point I can; that's enough for this one;
I can hit stop.
So, we've come back to the lab from the river.
And, we have our data in our LabQuest.
And, what I wanted to do is to take it out of here,
and put it into the computer, into the Logger Pro software.
Logger Pro is our software package for computers
it allows me to do data collection.
But, it has an interesting feature, in that it will
allow me to export data to Google Maps if I have coordinates,
which is what we have from our work here.
So, I have the Logger Pro software up and going.
And, I'm going to plug in the LabQuest via
the mini-USB cable that come with it, into that port.
And, when I do this the computer is
going to recognize there's data.
And so, it comes up here and asks me
if I would like to retrieve it?
I'm going to say, "Yes".
And then, I'll just say, "OK".
And, it's going to dump the data into the file I have open.
And, I end up with, kind of, a variety of graphs.
It depends on what I've been using,
and how I've been collecting here.
Some of these, I really don't want to use.
So, I'm going to actually going to highlight the particular graph,
hit the "Delete" key, and get rid of those two.
Let's see here. I like latitude and longitude.
And, I might want temperature versus;
go down here and click on the label of that lower axis there;
and I'm going to make it versus "Site".
And so, that way I have that one versus site.
And, I might want to auto-scale that graph, so I'm going to go
up here; it looks like a graph with an "A" inside;
so that will auto-scale that graph.
One of the things I can do is auto arrange.
And, this will just fill the page there.
So, you can do it under "Page".
You can do "Auto Arrange",
and that just fills the screen with my graphs.
And so, I've got latitude and longitude graph on the top,
And temperature at the three different sites at the bottom.
Some things I could do to the lower graph;
I might be interested in that being a bar graph,
so I could double-click on the graph itself.
This gives me the graph options maybe I make that a bar graph.
Say, "OK". So now, I have a bar graph at the
different locations where I collected data.
Now, Logger Pro has the ability to export to Google Maps.
And this will bring up the picture from space
where I collected the data.
So, I'm going to go under "File",
I'm going to pull down to "Export As" - "Google Map…".
Now, my computer is connected to the Internet right now.
And so, that has to, I have to be, to allow this to happen.
Now, because I did different sites the default here is,
it's coming up and it want to "Show Text Markers".
And so, those will be displays on the photograph of
where we collected the data. So, I've got that checked.
And, it's going to show the five points that I did.
At this point, I'm going to say "OK".
It sends the data out through the Vernier web site,
and brings up the picture from space.
I might choose to look at a satellite view of this.
So, there's satellite view.
I might choose to zoom in.
So, there are the five places I collected data along the stream.
If I came here and clicked on the markers,
I can actually look at what the values are
for those different points.
And, that's where that, where it said show "Show Text Markers",
that's what it's asking about.
So, at this point, I could look at those if I wanted to,
put them away if I want to.
So, It's pretty nice to be able to do this.
When you're doing environmental work,
it allows you to bring up the picture from space
where you collected the data.
So, that you could learn some things about
a situation that you might not know otherwise.
We've seen a couple of use cases of the built in GPS
on the new LabQuest 2.
We did some data collection, a time based,
where I walked around in the field.
We saw the data matrix version,
where we collected some data along a stream.
So, those'd be two common ways of doing this.
So, the built-in GPS on the LabQuest is
definitely an interesting addition to the device.
And, we'd love to see what you can do with it.