Mothitor Light - CSC 230 Final Project

The purpose of our project

This project was designed for Professor Abarca, and the Insect Ecology Lab at Smith College. One of the lab's current projects, the Mothitor, is a non-lethal moth monitoring device that attracts insects to a lit-up wooden panel and takes pictures of them using a RaspberryPi. The Mothitor collects data at night, from 9pm to 12am, from roughly April to September. Because the Mothitor functions by using a light trap, the data collected is impacted by the overall amount of light around. For example, a significantly lower amount of moths will be captured during a full moon.

For this purpose, Skye Weaver-Worster 25J', worked to implement a data transfer system to collect SQM (Sky Quality Meter) measurements in the MacLeish Field station (where the Mothitor instances are situated) and send the data back to Smith using a Raspberry Pi.

Our project enables a more accessible usage of that data, and adds additional information. Indeed, including moon phase data was a requirement for our stakeholder, Professor Abarca. Because accessibility was our main focus, we focused on using a restricted amount of tools to harmonize the data. We also made it into a .csv format, prefered by ou stakeholder. Furthermore, to ease future data analysis in Professor Abarca's classes and lab, we incorporated an R package, mothitoR, to summarize and visualize the data.

You can also find an overview of our different approaches to this project in this presentation, and in our Design Summary paragraph.

Included Files

'Mothitor Join.qmd'

Takes in a CSV of Mothitor light sensor data as a manual input in the R code and joins it to the moon phase data based on date.

'convert.py'

python3 convert.py [file_name]

Takes in a user-input Mothitor light sensor .dat file and converts it to a .csv.

'convert_and_moon.py'

python3 convert_and_moon.py [file_name]

Takes in a user-input Mothitor light sensor .dat file, converts it to a .csv, and joins the moon phase data to it using Python.

'moon_light_join.sql'

Sample code that creates databases for the Mothitor light data and moon phase data and joins them together in a SQL environment.

'moon_phases.csv'

A CSV file of moon phase data from 2000 to 2030. Includes date, area, category, and phase.

Our MothitoR R package

This R package contains data summary functions for light and moon data: https://github.com/CDarling25/mothitoR

How to set up and run the project

Instructions for the mothitoR R package can be found in the package's README.

Here is a link to our User Instructions Document for this repository.

Presentation Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10UENs4Snu6hpDb2WjVCBXUIZV9QgE7sOm1h-WBfR50c/edit?usp=sharing