Field Mate Part 1 - A Strange Conversation ...

I was involved in a rather strange conversation recently, wherein a number of mineral collectors and wildlife observers (read - photographers) expressed  their concern at the amount of information that they would like to record about the conditions and location where they were collecting specimens, taking pictures, making observations etc.

I had to agree.

When you wander off the beaten track, you need to know where you are and which way you are looking - a job adequately performed by a handheld GPS unit, but what about air temperature? Light levels? Barometric pressure? Wind speed? Visibility? Humidity?

Some of these sensors are included in a tablet computer, others in a range of hand-held instruments.

What we wanted was a device that would record where we were, all of those things that we could measure above, and a reference number to associate with our hand-written notes and photographs.

There is precisely no single thing on the market that will do this on the market, and NASA don't supply Mars Rovers to the general, walking public. Thus another project idea is born ...


A small computer (Raspberry Pi, Arduino etc.) fed by a stack of Li-Ion batteries, fitted with GPS, environmental sensors, a display and some buttons. The whole doesn't have to be a single box - the system can sit in your rucksack, GPS and environmental sensors on the strap at your shoulder, and a dangling module with display and controls for recording photo-points, observation points, way-marks and to start/stop track logging.

While it sounds incredibly complicated, as soon as you discard the need for keyboard input (pencil & paper has served admirably for years) and taking photographs (an ordinary camera does this very well indeed), then the project becomes one of simple data-capture and recording.

 I'm calling the project Field Buddy. FieldMate [Edit: 06 August 2015 - Field Buddy is a totally uninspiring expression, after all]

For reasons of the way the words fail to trip off the tongue, I am renaming the idea Field Mate.


Going one further, the NMEA communication protocol uses simple, text sentences to transmit data. Recording those sentences generated by GPS and your other instruments, produces a log of your travels that can then be re-interpreted through your lap-top computer when the day is done. The NMEA standard includes sentence identifiers for everything you could possibly need. Since this is not a marine project, then the serial port hardware specified in the NMEA 0183 standard  isn't required. On the other hand, why not a version for nautical use?

Now all I want is to find a thimble-sized Stevenson Screen, tiny wind-vane and a ¼" anemometer ...


[Edit - It's a Stevenson Screen, not a Beaufort Screen as I originally wrote.]