[Yr11 Information Technology] Re: data loggers

[McDonald, Debra A1]

Andrew email me tomorrow and I will put you onto our science technician who=
 does this all the time.

cheers
Debra McDonald
Lyndhurst Secondary College


-----Original Message-----
From: yr11it-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Steven Bird
Sent: Tue 20/02/07 10:09 PM
To: yr11it at edulists.com.au
Subject: [Yr11 Information Technology] Re: data loggers
 
Andrew Grimshaw" <grimshaw.andrew.j at edumail.vic.gov.au> wrote:
> we are looking at getting some data loggers to link directly w laptops
>
> does any1 have any experience using these?

Instead of extra hardware and all the attendant issues, you might
consider using the web for a different kind of 'remote sensing'.  Many
websites present meteorological, astronomical, financial etc data in a
format that can be easily accessed by a program.

For example, here's a little Python program that grabs historical
rainfall data covering the last century, directly from the Bureau of
Meteorology website.  Its a simple matter to plot the data and analyze
trends.

--snip--
from urllib import urlopen
rainfall_data =3D
urlopen('http://www.bom.gov.au/web01/ncc/www/cli_chg/timeseries/rain/0112/au=
s/latest.txt')
for line in rainfall_data.readlines():
    date, rainfall =3D line.split()
    print date, rainfall
--snip--

Sometimes the data comes in CSV format, ready to drop into a
spreadsheet.  Often one has to do a bit of pre-processing to strip out
HTML tags, and for this a bit of simple scripting usually does the
trick.

-Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/
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