@

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Pirates@Home - the Captain's Cabin

A temperature sensor has been set up in Cap'n Jack's cabin (which also houses the Pirates@Home server). The graphs below show the measurements for the past couple of days or so.

This graph was produced by a ROOT script (see root.cern.ch) with output in the form of an Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file, which is then translated to a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file using Ghostscript.

The gifsicle program can be used to easily string together a sequence of GIF images into a 'flipbook' animation. Here are the past 100 or so plots turned into such an animation.

At some point in the future we will test output as an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file, either directly from ROOT or filtered from an EPS file.

[SVG here some day]

The final graph was produced using the 'stripchart' CGI program which comes with BOINC. It is a perl script which uses GNUplot to render the drawing. I modified it to produce PNG output, since GNUplot no longer produces GIF images.

Plotting a temperature several different ways may not seem that interesting, but in some ways it is. First, you can see clearly in these graphs a demonstration of Newton's Law of Cooling. You can also tell from the rate at which the trend changes whether heating in the morning is due to the building heat system or natural warming from the environment. More importantly, imagine that instead of temperature we plot measurements taken from LIGO seismometers, and make this available to any High School with an internet connection so that they can do all sorts of interesting and educational investigations.