Post date: Sep 27, 2015 7:40:22 PM
On Tuesday, September 22nd we met with Oreste Venier over Skype to discuss the use of his moto ondoso and tracking sensors. The moto ondoso sensor would be placed along the sides of the Grand Canal, and uses an array of sensors along with sophisticated algorithms to compute wave height up to 40 times per second. Although this would be interesting to use, we are still seeing what the utility of the system would be to us. Since a lot of this data has already been gathered over the course of previous projects, the sensors could be used to update the existing data or, more interestingly, create before and after comparisons of wake in the canal. A baseline could be collected during our seven weeks in Venice, and a new baseline recorded in five years after the effects of the proposal have had time to settle. Comparisons could then give us solid statistics on wake reduction throughout the city.
The other device which Oreste explained was the murrina tracking device. The murrina itself is a necklace with the tracking device embedded inside; of course, we would opt to drop the necklace entirely and just place the tracker and transmitter in some weather-sealed container. The tracker itself can be either gate- or GPS-based. When using the gate-based emitter, the transmitter will send its ID whenever it gets within a range of a receiver gate (this could be an intersection or other point of interest). This is something you would use to track traffic flow through a specific area, for example.
The GPS-based solution is more of a personal tracking device. It can record position at time intervals, and then either stores it in the long-term, or uploads the information as it reaches receiver gates throughout the city. An alternate mode of operation has it take a point once it's at a certain distance from the previous point. This provides a smaller data payload (useful if transmitting over a short interval of time to a receiver gate), but less path information (a boat could go to a lot of places within, say, 100m of its previous point). What we are interested in would probably be the higher resolution interval-based path-tracking method, which could then be taken at the end of the day and uploaded to some central server without the need for gates or a smaller data payload.
The device is produced by the electronics division of company Eraclit.