GEARS 2024

Day 1

The first day we led off with introductions and then the Gentry Fire Department graciously agreed to again come out and let our students use fire extinguishers on a real fire. Personally, this is one of those segments of the workshop that I don’t think we’ll ever give up. So many people will be exposed to a fire in their lifetime and if they know how to quickly control the situation they may save some property or even their own life. Using a fire extinguisher doesn’t need to be scary, but until you’ve actually done it, you will likely be at least slightly intimidated or apprehensive. This eliminates that fear and it helps us know that everyone working in our facility during the week of the workshop just had a refresher and is ready and able to help stop a small fire if one begins in the shop.

SPIDI Technologies LLC, one of our long time customers who creates and distributes information about meteorological hazards to the power grid for a number of companies and agencies, was gracious enough to provide lunch on Monday. The students all ordered and received lunch boxes from Zaxby’s. This helped us cover more information, as everyone was fueled up and didn’t have to drive into town to get food which often means a longer lunch break. Thanks to Sid Sperry and SPIDI for Monday’s lunch!

In the evening everyone gathered at Ivory Bill Brewing Company in downtown Siloam Springs. We held a poster session allowing students to explain their research to each other as well as the general public. The poster session has always been a highlight of the workshop as students tend to discover many commonalities between their research and improve their presentation skills explaining their research to an interested public audience.

Day 2

We started out day 2 talking about electricity and electronics. This is one of those topics that is incredibly hard to teach because we cannot assume much prior knowledge and the field is very large and also very unintuitive. Students probably had some basic electronics in a physics course early in their undergraduate career, but that has been a few years for most and many of them likely found the presentation in a large lecture hall uninspiring at the time. We tried to turn that around with a series of short lectures covering basic theory, common electrical components, and some block diagrams. We did not go nearly as deep into circuit design, amplifiers, or any of the more advanced topics as in previous years, instead electing to spend more time on making sure the basics were well covered.

This change came from student feedback in prior years as well as an internal discussion in which we realized that students are likely not going to be doing “from scratch” circuit design. Instead they are going to be putting blocks together to accomplish a task, say a load cell, an amplifier, and a display. In addition when we presented some of the more advanced topics we got knee deep, but to do a successful research design from scratch it just wasn’t enough.

Lunch on Wednesday was provided by the Siloam Springs Chamber of Commerce. We’ve been a continual member of the chamber since moving our business back to the area in 2019. Thank you to the chamber for allowing us to have a quick lunch on Wednesday which led back into the last frenzy of instrument building as the students tried to get things finished up for their deployments. 

Day 3

Most of the morning classroom time of day three was spent talking about various types of sensors and instrumentation. We discussed the commonly measured parameters such as temperature, strain, load, and displacement. Each of these topics has a very diverse set of sensors that can be used to measure it, but knowing the basics is often enough to get the job done. This was also good timing as most students were ready to dive into adding the instrumentation to the framework of their projects that they began earlier in the week.

Talking about digitization systems was done a bit more as its own segment this year. Though it is “electronics,” we’re really more focused on designing the connections between a transducer, signal conditioning, and acquisition device more so than component level electronics. Again, we took a lot of the same slides, but rearranged and focused them to really show the thought process from “I have this sensor” all the way to data showing up in some digital form. We also took the opportunity to showcase the LabJack ADC/DAC devices that we have really been quite happy with (more on them later).

Day 4

Day 4 started off with instrument deployment. Last minute adjustments were made to instruments and the students went out to collect data before the heat of the day. For some groups this meant digging a trench behind the shop to get slope failure, others went on a boat to measure properties of the local lake, some put temperature sensors out beneath cars and in ice water baths, and some generated static charges to simulate charge movement in the sky. The data collection process is always hectic, but by lunch everyone had data in hand. A big thanks to Kurt Price for taking the lake group out on his boat with sonar for data collection!

One of the new activities this year was a tour of the local coal power plant, operated by Southwestern Electric Power Company/AEP. This tour was made possible by a connection with the plant’s environmental consultant. I was blown away by the time taken by the plant staff and I think they enjoyed having a tour group that wanted to know about everything they saw. This tour showed students instrumentation at a whole different scale. They were able to see flow meters, temperature sensors, pressure sensors, PLCs, HMIs, actuated valves, and many more pieces of “industrial lego.” This exposure means next time they need a sensor for an application they may remember something they saw on the tour. They also learned a lot about just how much knowledge and work goes into any piece of critical infrastructure and I doubt they’ll pass any plant or large infrastructure installation again without wondering about what is inside. Thank you to all of the people at the plant that worked to take our students on this tour and to AEP for graciously providing their time. 

Day 5

Friday we started out with a few presentations from the list of things we hadn’t talked about, but were ready to discuss. Students voted on what topics they felt would be the most useful to them and we prioritized that way. Then we gave the groups a bit of time to analyze their data and prepare their presentations before the food and guests arrived.

Projects for this year were done in a similar time as the last few years, students spending most of the afternoons working in their small teams on building and testing an instrument with help from our staff. This year we had four groups of three students. We have experimented with different sizes of student groups for the projects, but three or four seems to be the ideal number as everyone always has something to do.

We gave the students several project options and a write in. In the end we went with the CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) probe, strain meter, temperature sensing string, and electric field slow antenna projects. For the first time, we recorded the group’s presentations, which are being released over on our YouTube Channel, as well as two bonus presentations from visiting scientists Shannon Dulin and Mike Stock. The Gentry Chamber of Commerce provided lunch for the students and visiting audience members for the presentations. Janie always takes care of our students and we really appreciate her efforts!

After lunch with the community, students had the opportunity to try different shop processes they had not yet got to try, ask our staff questions, or even work on something that they brought with them from their home laboratory. Welding is always a popular request during this time, as is more one-on-one attention with topics like electronics repair and field wire splicing. McKee Foods, makers of Little Debbie snack cakes, sent each student home with lots of treats for their trip and subsequent hacking sessions back in their labs! Our local Haas dealer, Phillips, also provided some T-shirts, hats, and other CNC related SWAG for the students to take with them. We really value our partnerships and relationships with local businesses and try to impress upon students that in making anything, relationships are more than half of the battle.

Data Logging

Another thing we tried this year was more standardization around the data collection side of the projects. LabJack makes my favorite data acquisition system on the market and we’ve used it in several equipment installations professionally. This is their second year as a sponsor of the GEARS workshop. They have donated enough of their T7 data logger product that each group had a dedicated device for measurement and control of their projects. Big thanks to Al at LabJack for continuing the company’s support of our workshop and to LabJack in general for making such a great product!

At the last minute I had the idea to put a HAT onto a RaspberryPi to make a ready-to-go data logger for the projects to use. Just push the button and viola! Jonah and Priya made the HATs Tuesday morning and I finished the program Tuesday at lunch. With such a rushed development cycle there were some changes and challenges along the way, but overall that experiment worked out well and the LabJacks performed perfectly collecting some really nice datasets. I think the biggest issue that we encountered with this setup was that the SD cards in the Raspberry Pi repeatedly corrupted. We eventually traced this down after the workshop to a fake branded SD card from Amazon. These off brand cards just weren’t quality.

What to Keep and What to Change

Just like any year, some of the changes we made were good, some were neutral, and some didn’t work as well as what we have done in the past. While all of the minute details are not that interesting, I did want to capture the bigger trends we saw and how we’ll continue to innovate and adapt. There are a few overarching categories that jump out. Namely project scope, more lecture structure changes, and lab activities.

Project scope is probably the hardest part of the workshop for our team. In year one we didn’t have a project, just lots of little lab activities. Year two was the first group project, but the projects were very structured and ended up successful. Year three we removed most of the structure. While it worked out well, the results could have been better with a little more guidance from our team on the scope. This year we added a little more structure and made the groups uniformly quite small. This worked well, but the scope still needs some adjustment. Currently the students have a few afternoons to not only design and build an instrument from scratch, but then to collect data, process it, calibrate it, and present it. That’s a lot of work and means that there have been a couple of after hours work sessions.

While our team is no stranger to long hours, the workshop is pretty busy and stressful for the staff and the cognitive load for the students is intense. By the end of the day, everyone was tired and the evening work was certainly less efficient than during the day. We don’t have the solution yet, but it will be some combination of making the measurement task slightly less complex and having some more off the shelf parts involved. This also makes the project more realistic as students generally don’t have access to all of the equipment we have at the shop when they return to their lab.

Another change to the projects will be to eliminate the write-in option. While the write-in options we’ve had in the past couple of years have worked out, they are certainly the highest risk. In the end, our team just can’t be as prepared for a project we didn’t know was going to exist. While we do have a good stock of parts, it always is a stretch. We don’t want the projects to just be assembling the blocks we’ve picked, but we do need to have some more planning and a team member that is very familiar with the project to help get the group started.

The last project change is trying to emphasize that the projects are to learn instrumentation, not necessarily to do science. We’ve struggled with exactly how to solve this and have some things to consider for next year. The main issue is that while the projects are done in time, collecting interesting data takes time. This is especially true if a group creates an instrument that depends on natural signals, like the pressure sensor testing group from year 2. Only 12-24 hours of data can be collected before it is time to present – a difficult task for anyone. We do like the field deployment aspect of many of the projects, but it is a time consuming process for sure. 

The restructuring of the lectures worked out pretty well overall. The electronics section could still use some restructuring, but the mechanical section went very well and breaking up big lectures into smaller more specific ones like “Sealing Things” or “Making Things Move” made it easier to adapt to the student’s interests and the ever changing schedule. We also really liked the shop walkthrough and equipment demonstrations. The students asked a ton of questions and got to really not just hear about, but see, how so many processes work. We will probably be adding more small labs to help with the slight limiting of the project scope. The labs will probably be stations focused on milling, turning, electronics, etc. and we may rotate groups through so that there is more doing and less waiting for resources. While not a big change or even issue, we think this will enhance the experience even more.

If AEP is open to hosting us again, and the schedules work, we would love to keep the tour of the coal power plant on the schedule, as that was a big hit and very useful for all of the students. Getting exposure to instrumentation in its natural habitat like that is irreplaceable and most people just don’t get the chance. 

A final change to consider is going back to having all lunches at the shop instead of going into town. I do like the students getting the chance to go support local small businesses, but the time is significant. We will see what the pros and cons look like before next year and adapt if necessary.

Get Ready for 2025!

Be sure to plan on sending your students to next year’s workshop! We will announce dates after the first of the year, but plan on late August 2025 for FIVE YEARS OF GEARS! Also a final huge thank you to everyone involved with the workshop as sponsors, and to those that opened their facilities to our use or gave us tours. The workshop is not a way for us to make money. In fact, it generally is negative, but we continue to do it because we believe it is that important and to give back to the scientific community we serve. Without incredible partners, it just wouldn’t be possible.