Field Mate Part 2 - Open Your Eyes to an Open Sensorium

A few posts past, I addressed the idea of Field Buddy Field Mate - a portable device for capturing environmental data while in the field. Having had a chance to play with a bit of magnetometry (amongst other toys), and finding that I need to build an intelligent thermostat, I have come to the conclusion that there is something lacking in the world of hobby/amateur electronics - and that is a properly integrated set of devices and software for microcontroller use.

I have decided, therefore, that it is time to formalise the Field Mate concept into a more general project.

To this end, I have decided to commence work on what I am calling The Open Sensorium Project.

The aim is to produce a series of software and hardware modules that can be built up and put together in order to build custom instrumentation. Based around Data Capture using sensors (i.e. a sensorium), the modules will provide both sensing, primary processing and export of data via displays, data streaming and data caching (using SD cards).

It will not only provide an open sensorium, in the sense that the data system's "eyes" are wide open, but will also be an open project - open source software, open source hardware (albeit, using a lot of off-the-shelf modules) and free to use and modify.

Given the relatively low cost of microcontrollers, it would be possible for each major module to be separately intelligent.

I hope that there will be a lot of cross-pollination with various other projects, and between the developers using a range of microcontroller systems including, but not limited to, Microchip's PIC, Parallax Propeller, Atmel AVC / Arduino and Raspberry Pi,

As an open project, the material will be released into the wild with few restrictions, and subject to the Gnu General Public Licence.

The rules will be simple - open source may not form a part of a closed source project unless those portions that are open source remain open source. Derivative works are brilliant. Respect and acknowledge the intellectual rights of those whose work you are building upon - and retain any copyright notices that form a part of the source that you are using.

Finally, there will be standards for various parts of the project - standards for quality of product, for quality of documentation and for communication protocols between modules - and to the outside world.

I hope that others will want to get involved in various ways - even if it is only through an eMail saying that you found it useful.

I look forward to hearing from you. I will pass on the web site address once I have settled upon one. I have set up a project page on Sourceforge at: https://sourceforge.net/p/open-sensorium/



For those who care about these things - the font is Neuropolis, the logos were made in MS Word 2013 and either screen-captured or copied to Inkscape.

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.]