Today was a very big day! The probes are installed and working! I'm getting my first pieces of data - although they may not be very useful at this time in the year. I did some reading in the morning, and Chris, Henry, Poy, and Dohyoung came around noon to begin installation. Installation lasted for a good four hours! We spliced some of the wire coming off the tree because of length issues, and we decided that the probes should be mounted 2.5m off the ground. We installed two pairs of probes in each of the trees. We had to use a pretty tall ladder to reach! I personally installed several of the probes, gaining very valuable experience that I'll be sure to carry on with me! We had a problem with the wire we bought - it was comprised of solid pieces of copper! It was a little hard to twist the constantan and copper wires on the probes around a solid piece of copper! We had to resort to a large amount of solder for each probe. We eventually got everything together and into the tree. Then, sensor six went offline. No matter what we did, we could not get the sensor to come online! We decided simply to leave the sensor alone for now and fix it if something else went wrong as well. Everything else was plugged in and working, though. Aluminum tins were fitted around the probes in order to provide some kind of environmental shielding.
Sensor five seems to be measuring a very high value - there's nothing we can do about that right now. I also learned how to do the wiring for the datalogger and the power supply - it's a little complicated but it isn't anything impossible. We got the datalogger to interface with my computer, although that was a challenge in itself.
Tomorrow I'll just be doing some more research and looking at the first day's data!
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