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Thursday, October 2, 2014

Onset HOBOware Temperature Logger

It's been raining for 3 days now and this has given us a nice reprieve from working in the vineyard. However, that doesn't mean that all work related to our vineyard comes to a halt. Recently, my husband bought 3 temperature data loggers from Onset to put in our vineyard so that we can more accurately monitor the temperature in the coming year. When we received the software installation CD and the data loggers, my husband asked me to install the software and configure and test the loggers. Okay, this was right up my alley because in a previous life, I used to install computational software and manage computer hardware. I read the little installation manual and then got ready to configure the loggers.
The installation, complete with pictures was not as intuitive as I had hoped it would be but somehow I muddled through it and then configured the loggers to do the overnight test in 3 different locations in our home. When I got ready to download the data, I was lost. Then, my husband found this YouTube video to help me:
It turns out that the data shuttle must be initiated by the computer while the software is up and running. Then the shuttle will be able to download the data collected by the logger. When the data have been downloaded to the shuttle, the shuttle will reinitialize the logger and restart the logging. Now, the shuttle has all of the data which can then be transferred to the computer. At this point, the shuttle is called a base station.
The beauty of this is that the initialized shuttle can be taken to the vineyard, sans computer and the data can be transferred to this handy device. I've set the loggers to collect a data point once every 10 minutes so that means that I can collect data for 44 days without having to download it from the loggers. But before deployment, one more test in the home to ensure that I really understand what is going on!

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