Development of an Ecosystem of Open Source Environmental Data Loggers

Abstract

Automated data loggers are used extensively in the fields of environmental and agricultural monitoring. There exist a variety of commercial data logger options as well as several open source options. Between these systems there is the long established trade-off of reliability and support for cost. Open source systems generally do not have dedicated support and require a greater onus on the user, but as a result are significantly lower in cost. However, there is a potentially more significant issue which has yet to be addressed: flexibility. As the cost and power consumption of instrumentation has decreased in the previous decades, the field of automated instrumentation has expanded from standard meteorological (MET) stations into a myriad of novel sensing applications. This is an issue which, in general, both the commercial and open source communities have failed to address. By and large, the open source loggers which are available currently are developed with the goal of replacing their commercial alternatives, as a singular and highly generic device. It is felt that this is not the optimal approach, as it is unreasonable to believe that a single device could adequately serve all of these unique sensing challenges. With this in mind, we have developed a series of open source dataloggers, each designed to exist in concert with each other as opposed to in competition. All this is done with the goal of best meeting the needs of researchers for their unique applications in a flexible, low cost, and robust system.