chaos part 2: where are they?

Last week I built the prototypes of the GPS tracker messages in bottles and tested them out. I learned a few key things:

• 1 - Bottles float on their sides unless you add a considerable amount of weight to one end. which makes sense I guess. They're longitudinally symmetrical cylinder filled with air, so they float like pontoons not buoys
• 2 - The magnets the LandAirSea 54s are equipped with are suuuper strong. This is a good thing if you're trying to attach it to a metal part of your car, but makes it difficult to keep them from clumping together while floating around the pool. When you're trying to study chaos theory...this kind of doesn't work.

Lessons learned, I tweaked the design and it looks this in its final form:

I got to work, printed the parts, drank a bunch of Yoohoo! (well...my research assistants did) glued everything together and ended up with these:

The original plan for these was to put them together in a clump and drop them off five miles offshore. However...both of those plans had to change.

As mentioned above these trackers are magnetic. When I dropped the finished bottles in my pool and turned on the pump they never came unclumped. The magnetic forces were high enough that they just moved around the pool as a single object. The waves in the Gulf probably would have separated them over time, but:

• If they stick together this experiment is boring
• I'm currently dependent on others for my rides offshore and I'm not sure when I'd be able to get back out again

I decided it wasn't worth risking a boring result and settled on an initial spacing of "about 20 feet or wherever my research assistants decided to actually listen and drop the things in the water already!"

We headed out in the boat with the trackers pinging every 10 seconds until one of the trackers (Daisy) lost signal. Daisy started glitching about 2 miles out. Dewey, Louie and Donald were still pinging, but to avoid having the bottles drift out of range and gathering zero interesting data I made the executive decision to drop them off at the 2 mile mark.

...then things got interesting. More to come next week.