[Yr11 Information Technology] Re: data loggers

[Steven Bird]

Andrew Grimshaw" <grimshaw.andrew.j at edumail.vic.gov.au> wrote:
> we are looking at getting some data loggers to link directly w laptops
>
> does any1 have any experience using these?

Instead of extra hardware and all the attendant issues, you might
consider using the web for a different kind of 'remote sensing'.  Many
websites present meteorological, astronomical, financial etc data in a
format that can be easily accessed by a program.

For example, here's a little Python program that grabs historical
rainfall data covering the last century, directly from the Bureau of
Meteorology website.  Its a simple matter to plot the data and analyze
trends.

--snip--
from urllib import urlopen
rainfall_data =
urlopen('http://www.bom.gov.au/web01/ncc/www/cli_chg/timeseries/rain/0112/aus/latest.txt')
for line in rainfall_data.readlines():
    date, rainfall = line.split()
    print date, rainfall
--snip--

Sometimes the data comes in CSV format, ready to drop into a
spreadsheet.  Often one has to do a bit of pre-processing to strip out
HTML tags, and for this a bit of simple scripting usually does the
trick.

-Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/