More revisions today as I try to dial in the most efficient way to collect and document the trash I find. I started by walking around my neighborhood. We had a windstorm recently so there was quite a bit of random stuff around. I learned:
- My S5 camera phone loses roughly 50% of its power with just 10 sets of images. It's obviously old, but it works so I'll have to figure something out on the battery life issue.
- The new tripod configuration works pretty well for the before/after shots and the green screen. The tilt is now around 23 degrees from vertical. The measurement board doesn't work as well and prefers a vertical view. For this round, I simply held the tripod roughly orthogonal to the measurement board.
- I think I need to add a stiffener to my green/white screen boards. Probably the measurement board too. They're unwieldy to get back into the messenger bag I have.
- I also find that taking the scale measurements is inconsistent. It adds another step and almost everything barely registers.
I came back inside and sorted/documented the images. I don't think there's a faster way to do it short of writing a special app. Probably the best improvement would be to pre-document via a photo app. Something that names as it goes and maybe isolates the green screen images automatically.
Later in the afternoon I went over to a local trailhead. There was plenty of trash in the gravel parking lot and I tried a new process. Instead of taking a before/after/measurement/green screen series for each piece of trash, I tried taking just the before/after and making a pile. After I collected everything in the immediate area, I put each piece on the measurement board and then on the green screen board. It was much faster to take the images, but it pushes the effort to the documentation phase where I had to check each image to see which set it belonged to. Other things I learned:
- My phone overheated twice due to the 90 degree weather, being in the sun, and being used in camera phone mode. Both times I had to take it out of the sun, keep it shut off, and try to dump heat via conduction into my relatively cool hands. More evidence that I may need a better solution than an old camera phone.
- The measurement board also became very (very) flexible. Much hotter and I don't know if it would have survived. I probably could have stretched it permanently if I wasn't careful.
- I'm trying to figure out the best way to document some things. I try to label the background (such as grass, gravel, etc...) since I expect that context will matter. However, it's tough when you've got gravel, a cement parking block, grass, and dead vegetation in the same image. It's kind of the same issue with labeling the garbage. How descriptive I want to be and how I want to document it moving forward continues to make me think. If this keeps going, I expect that I'll develop a web interface that lets me add a bunch of tags as descriptors of an image.
- The weird trash for today was a smart phone foil cover of some sort. The image below is part of it. It's a Samsung wrapper of some sort and it had a foil blue side to it. There was no rigidity... just a bunch of fragile foil.
For next week, I'll try to rigidize my boards and make a sun shade for my phone. I'll keep trying to find efficiencies as well. I'd really like to get a documentation set down to 20 seconds or less as a start.
In other news, I noticed that the Ocean Clean-up trials version 2 are chugging along. It looks like they've embraced the rapid engineering/trial cycle. My feeling is that it's the right mode of operation to be in right now and I look forward to seeing what they learn
I've also noticed that the Ocean Voyagers fishing net clean-up article I mentioned a couple of weeks ago keeps making the rounds. Each time I read it at another source, it's less specific and gets a couple of things wrong. The last time I saw it, it showed up on Reddit. Many people pointed out that their effort represented the tiniest fraction of impact. Others pointed out that it was a start. I'm with the latter group. It's great that Ocean Voyagers is getting publicity and, hopefully, it leads to opportunities later to do more great work.
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