The LENSS project aims to reach its goal of creating a remotely operable Sky Quality Meter in an environment where everyone, regardless of experience or background feels comfortably uncomfortable. We want everyone to feel challenged and successful at the same time. To this end, we are going to create Challenge Projects and Entry-level Projects. Both will contribute to our goal.
Challenge Projects in Engineering will be lead by Marc Berthoud. Marc will be mostly working remotely but Alex Scerba (one of the LENSS Student Leaders) and Alex Traub (4th-year computer science undergraduate from UW Milwaukee) will be at the GLAS office this summer. They will help people get started on projects that will focus on connecting existing sky quality meters via the internet, along with beginning to build a "from scratch" sky quality meter.
Entry Projects in Engineering Electronics and Design will be lead by Marc and company. These groups will handle the task of creating a simple sensor and connecting it to some read-out method. That could be visual or auditory. The first task of this group is to understand how we get the data from a sensor into a form that we can do something with it. David Yost (local retired engineer) will lead an exploration of how to connect a Tibbo unit to a light sensor. Another activity will be to test how these sensors perform in different conditions: humidity, temperature, etc. The group will also work on finding ways to connect different devices together wirelessly, such as sending data between an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi or a Tibbo. When the Challenge Projects team get rolling there will also be opportunities for us to test their work.
Education Projects and Accessibility Projects will be lead by Kate Meredith. We have some great opportunities to get started right now. The NEW Dark Skies Education Kits are on their way! We also need to contact the Dark Skies Association to understand what standards we need to meet to prove that what we build is acceptable to them. In other words: What performance standards do we need to meet?
Marketing and Media Project will be lead by Deb Kaelbli and supported by Lauren Manicke. We need a webpage and a logo. We need to recruit. Everyone is going to help with recruiting but we need some extroverts to lead the way.
We are using Slack as our main communication tool. The projects pages are the best place do document progress on particular projects, but get on Slack to stay in touch with teams, leaders, mentors, and each other.