hangout with brian

Some of the crew did a video conference with Brian Huang of Sparkfun about using sleep functions to reduce power consumption in our projects. As usual, no matter the topic, Brian was on top of it.  The kids took down his suggestions.  He also gave some ideas on how to get the data coming over the Ethernet shield at the North Chickamauga site to graph, rather than just print some numbers on a blank IP address screen.
The key right now is to bypass the initialization "Press D12" part of the Vernier shield so that the probes take readings automatically once power has been restored to the shield following the sleep period (which would be most of the day).  If we're going to try to get by with using only a 20 ah battery in the buoy and come only once a month to check in for data harvesting and power check, we need to squeeze every milliamp we can.