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Hello, I'm Dave and one of the things that I do is act as the Arcata city data network administrator. I am also exiting slowly from my previous duties as instrumentation / controls / telecom technican for the Environmental Services department of the city. In this time of technical specialization my job description is broad. It includes using a jackhammer and many power tools, doing programming and gui design , instrument technician work, image acquisition and processing, some graphic design , networking, pneumatic plumbing, CAD documentation, electrical design, RF troubleshooting, data system installation, the city web page and sweeping the control building when its my turn. When absolutely necessary, I will even climb towers and build control systems underground.


 

 

Former Employers


 

 

Current Hardware and Software Projects (2-1-2000)

In conjunction with work projects and my school project I have IIS, NTserver 4.0, ESRI map server, Oracle 8i, proxy server, redhat Linux 6.x et al, running on the collection of pot metal at home.  Am interested in including data from the OOpic, java programmed microcontroller in a website for real time enviro data.

Any day the IBM intellistation will arrive. I will set it up on the web to act as a map server to the community. It will be programmed using ESRI's map objects sofware with the excellent content being created by Brian Kang, our GIS technician. It may open a door to a new way for the town to discuss its future.

I bought the city a new, more svelte domain name. Will be moving all to arcatacityhall.org soon.

I did a detailed Y2K sweep of every city computer, excepting the finance minicomputer. I am amazed to find that we have 92 computers in the organization.

We are having problems with Tank 7, the newest solar powered telemetry site in the city forest. It works okay ten months a year, but in winter it doesn't get adequate charging. Cutting trees may not be an option in our beloved forest and they laugh when I mention thermoelectric radioisotope power units, so I brought up the possibility of using one of the Schatz Energy Research Center, fuel cells under development at HSU. Dr. Lehmann is very interested and we are now exploring costs.

I am currently designing and building all new controls and instrumentation to allow the digester gas burner to operate automatically (and safely). This gas is a product of anaerobic processing of sewage sludge in the primary treatment plant digester. I am programming an object-oriented PIC to handle the burner's operation. This is the first time that this kind of chip has been widely available.

I just finished building a video production PC for the media group at city hall who broadcast the city council meetings on ACAT (Arcata Community Access Television). The machine can do real time MPEG digitization of video signals, produce program graphics and output all in NTSC for use in the on the air. I am tickled with how well it works. I made some demo presentations using digitized camcorder video and demonstated it to the operators. In the future I think we will see citizens being given a loaner camcorder and allowed to produce micro-shows in video windows of full screen power point presentations broadcast between the main station programming. This would be the ultimate cheapest way for any citizen to have a voice on cable.

The city's FTP site is operating.

Working to wire up and configure 2.4 Ghz wireless ethernet to the Arcata Transit Center.

Just finished designing and wiring new flow-paced controls that operate the fluoridation system at the Alliance pump station.

Honoring my commitment to Professor Garrett at HSU to produce a "spectral explorer" tool for use with ArcView. Still finding my way into Avenue, ESRI's object-oriented programming language for ArcView.

 

 

 

 

Very Recent Hardware and Software Projects

Building a GIS example project for class at HSU, which looks a ways of estimating mortality rates resulting from a catastrophic venting of chlorine gas.

Building a database/reporting system to replace the daily logbook kept (by regulation) at the wastewater treatment plant. It takes more than a hundred variables to capture the records of daily operations there. With this system, numerous daily calculations are no longer necessary, saving time and minimizing errors.

Research and conceptualization phase for design of a database concept that is capable of representing a planet possessing living, industrial and bio-industrial processes. I realize the magnitude of the aspiration.

I have chosen to attempt to describe the following real-world entitities as a means of testing my database concept. this is a collection of interesting data objects with distinct personalilties and behaviors. I have personal experience with, and strong opinions about them all:

The government of the city of Arcata... a temporary occupying organism that draws sustenance from the citizenry. This entity is evolving slowly in a socio-political soup of unusual richness. It is admirable while being a product of expedience

The mountain ridge between Horse mountain and Grouse mountain which lies 40 miles East of Arcata. It is sacred and profane at the same time. It has secret meadows, shooting ranges, rare plants, radio-tower villages and solitary views of hundreds of miles around. It lies under snow, fog and logging truck tires by turns during every year.

The wastewater treatment plant of the city of Arcata. One of the very first successful wastewater treatment plants to use natural processes to treat sewage. Imagine a huge beast heaving itself up on the shore of a great shallow bay and attaching its feeding tubes to the city's effluent stream, the power grid and gas mains. It also consumes lives of dedicated operators. What a creature to model.

Humboldt State University's oceanographic vessel. The current vessel is under a cloud so I will deal with an idealized vessel that possesses satellite instrumentation including an autonomous submersible. It is a surrogate exploratory space vessel that I like to think of sending to the mysterious and rich Gorda rise hundreds of miles offshore.

Design and implementation of a radio-linked backup chlorine alarm communication system

Submission of a design proposal with price and parts lists for a city hall ethernet network to the Arcata City Manager which resulted in a city budget item to fund the current construction project.

Using blueprints and strategic crawls design a wiring plan, then requisition appropriate equipment and media. Currently setting up Ntserver 4.0 software and connecting city departments.

 

 

Other Recent Hardware and Software Projects

these were during my undergraduate years at Humboldt State University

Electrical design, procurement, installation and programming of a remotely operated, solar powered computer controlled tank site on a remote hillside site for the city of Arcata

Construction and monitoring of the city's first sludge composting pile, designing and building programmable blower controls and temperature sensing network for same. Perform data reduction, charting, tabular presention of compost pile success

Maintaining the fish bioassay program for two years including maintenance, record keeping and trapping wild fish as necessary, then building subsystems of a new bioassay building: cistern construction, electrical, plumbing, installation of and caring for fish. This view is part of it when new.

Redesign and installation of new motor controls at the First Street Pump Station consisting of new online UPS, battery cabinet, new programmable pump controller, new programmable ultrasonic level sensor, modification of existing control circuitry, design of additional 12 volt isolation relay circuits with 4-20 mA splitters --- Also write a new station operations handbook to enable city personnel to operate and adjust settings at the station

Design and prototyping of sea kayaking navigation tools

Compilation and statistical analysis of six years of written records of primary digester operational data.

Conceptual prototyping of seabed deployed data logger

Technology-Art photoshop collage, an "homage" to municipal water (!)

Construction of and experimentation with neuroelectric "glasses" using electroencephalograph

Programming a dynamically linked (via Modbus) excel spreadsheet to provide a system-wide snapshot to capture the entire water system's status for archiving purposes

Participating in the startup of the citywide recycling program, doing the intial time trials at the newly constructing recycling facility and supplying database support for the routing of garbage trucks (pictured: the Director of Environmental Services, Steve Tyler)

Programming (in Visual Basic) a fuzzy logic trainer based on Bart Kosko's book, "Fuzzy Thinking"

Iniating and operating a expenditure tracking system for the Environmental Services department using quickbooks software

Construction of a sewer grease separation experimental tank for SHN engineering Inc. and assisting in on site research. That is me bucketing sewer grease. Note: as a comment on my lavishing so much in time and materials on the project, my fellow workers sprayed the apparatus' frame gold shortly before beginning of tests.

Design and construction of an all-mechanical and programmable stream water sampler. It can be adjusted to wait until a high water event has occurred and then activate at any subsequent lower water level, trapping a packet of turbid water for later analysis. Construction materials: Nancy's yogurt container, inner tube, Coors can and PVC.

Construction and operation of a linear RF amplifier for KFRA, Free Radio Arcata, our local community microradio station

One of the most important groups of experiences I've had during HSU was working with my wife Sydney on botany tasks that she undertook as an HSU student, an employee of Federal Government, a research associate of the California Native Plant Society and as a volunteer at several nature preserves. I was her periodic helper and what I learned from this plays a central role in my choice of a graduate school project. I helped collect plants for taxonomy classes, did GPS data logging and bushwhacked down forbidding ravines seeking Darlingtonia seeps in remote parts of the Six Rivers National Forest as a federal volunteer. I learned about doing vegetation sampling transects, making canopy density measurements, dune plant community seed bank research, use of a laser range finder in seed dispersal studies, greenhouse seedling propagation, collecting and pressing plant specimens, assisted in her designs for new new seed coring hardware and observed the intricacies of taxonomic keying. Experiencing her mapmaking work with ArcInfo and databases on the computer, and her field work, showed me the bridge between the land and computing machinery . I also acquired a sense of sympathy for the position of earth science researchers and their needs for collecting, accessing and understanding the increasing amounts of data becoming available to them. When this is combined with my background in process controls, instrumentation and imaging, it points me toward a fascinating synthesis that I wish to explore in graduate school at Humboldt State University.


 

 

A major aspect of my current work is keeping the Arcata water supply and wastewater treatment control and instrumentation systems functioning. The first supplies about two million gallons of drinking water each day. The second treats a similar volume of wastewater daily. This data network diagram illustrates the system that allows coordinated activity between over twenty discrete locations throughout the city and in the hills above it. The diagrammed system is mostly dedicated to drinking water supply. About twenty computers and a large number of programmable devices and instruments are involved

 

The image above is of one of the places I work, the Arcata Wastewater Treatment Plant. It is the view from atop the primary digester looking south across a clarifier, the chlorination building and an eastern part of Humboldt Bay toward the city of Eureka. The diked-in bodies of water are oxidation ponds. Public works has a large operation off to the left.

The illustration shows the layout of the city wastewater treatment plant. Roughly three quarters of the ponds you see are involved in wastewater treatment.

During my sophomore year at Humboldt State University, it was determined that our old city water supply SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system controlling 14 tank and pump sites was becoming unreliable. I was asked to write a bid specification for its replacement. I did so and with the approval of Harold Miller, the city purchaser it went out to public bid. The old system had cost approximately $300K a decade before. For its replacement the city received bids that high and higher. The low bid came in from Mr. Ted Roper at Roper Associates . For approximately $75k in hardware, some wiring equipment and my modest wages, I replaced the whole system. I did this while attending school full time. I brought each station on line, designing somewhat different wiring schemes as needed for the differing sites, with the old system still running in parallel until it was time to pull the plug on the last old RTU. I actually felt bad when I killed the last one.

Back at the wastewater treatment plant we use an industrial strenth MMI (Man, Machine Interface software program named Wonderware. I programmed about 10 Mbytes of screens for the graphical user interface that allows the operators to keep an eye on what is an autonomous system of fifteen or so sites talking to eachother, keeping the water system charged with fresh water from Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District. This water comes from coastal mountain runoff gathered in Ruth resevoir many miles inland and then delivered to HBMWD's wells via the Mad River.

Here are some facts about the replacement of the city's water supply control system that few people in our little town know:


 

 

I am grateful for the support of my two bosses, Steve Tyler (Director of Environmental Services, Arcata) and Bill Gilmer (Water/Wastewater Superintendent). A large part of my pay was in learning new hardware and software.
 

 


 

 

Here is a powerpoint presentation which I created. It explains how the drinking water supply system works .
 

 


 

 


 

Graduate School

Here is a preliminary version of my statement of graduate school objectives and a general description of my project LARVAE. The acronym stands for Landscape Annotation and Resource Visualization/Assessment Environment. It all started some time back when I was helping my wife find year-old inflorescences of the Humboldt Bay Wallflower in the coastal dunes. Standing in the twentieth similar sandy hollow it seemed that I should be able to write my findings in the air with my finger, that the letters, numbers, and images I captured would be visible now, next month, and next century to anyone....and that others who follow could write in this book of the land that is the land....

This is a copy of my initial proposal to Drs. Garrett and Fox for an integrated turbidity sensing network and vrml web page to enable efforts of the National Marine Fisheries Service to improve fish habitat on the Mattole River. In my experience, use of particle counters to "fingerprint" tributaries and a VRML web page to facilitate the education of watershed citizens on real time changes in the watershed's hydrology is something new (4-98)

Resume Brief Summary


 



Dave had wide experience in telecommunications, RF systems and process controls before college. He took a year off to kayak in Baja and Alaska with his wife, Sydney. On the beaches he realized he wanted to do more creative technical work, so he returned to college at Humboldt State University. 

During his undergraduate years he undertook numerous software/hardware projects where he had design, procurement, construction and programming responsibilities with no technical support and little supervision beyond just requiring a functioning, finished product in a timely fashion and at reasonable cost. These projects involved web development, programming, circuit design, database, construction and electronic troubleshooting. 

At HSU he created a Bachelor of Science major combining most of the computer science curriculum with digital imaging/multimedia, remote sensing and environmental studies. 

He is now a graduate student at HSU who believes that a novel database networked with embedded systems on the land and to humans with wearable computers is a paradigm for wisely managing this planet, corporate activity, warfighting and terraforming other planets. 

In his work he has straddled the line between software and hardware and between human institutions and nature. He can work with tools and with symbols. He prefers a project-results approach to work. 

His references and life history are impeccable. He is practical and is still a dreamer. 
 
 

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Logo design for the project is underway and LarvaeWare T-shirts and hats should be available this year.

R.I.P. Floops

Email Address

Cellular Number : 707.499-4057

Except for floops, all imagery, diagrams, ideas and pictured work is by Dave Weidling. All rights reserved.

update: 2-1-2000