Date of Award

6-2011

Document Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

James Hedrick

Language

English

Keywords

Ballston Lake, basin, stratification, geology, hydrology, water

Abstract

Located just 8 miles northeast of Union College is Ballston Lake, a unique lake, which offers excellent research opportunities for faculty and students. The south basin of the lake is permanently stratified, and there has been no intermixing between water layers for thousands of years. The lower water layers contain no oxygen (anoxic). The Union College Geology Department is interested in a ten year study of Ballston Lake. Currently, there is no commercially available automatic system for collecting and transmitting data from a sensor package at the bottom of the lake to the lake shore and finally to Union College for long-term research purposes. For this project, I have designed and implemented a prototype for an RF data communication system between Ballston Lake and Union College. This system will be used as a part of the long-term water monitoring system for Ballston Lake. The system will allow users to collect and transmit the water property data automatically without having most of the tedious human involvement. In addition, the system will not only offer a large amount of data storage space but also provide a convenient technique to manage and analyze data to help answer numerous questions concerning this fascinating lake. The system design contain both hardware and software components. They both worked together to provide all essential characteristics to perform data transmission reliably between Ballston Lake and Union College. Several possibilities for each hardware component are explored carefully to meet system requirements. In order to communicate reliably between two sites, the Master/Slave protocol is designed and implement. The protocol has been verified working properly with error detection, receiver feedback and retransmission. Several different scenarios of data transmission protocol were tested in order to check the robustness of the protocol.

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