Water was what Harry was worried about. More specifically the effectiveness of it at his secret Indium mine site. Harry had something going wrong with the collection of Indium from the falls water, which was bad. His whole process was based on collecting the metal after heavy rains in a remote area.
Harry had come up with an autonomous process which extracted the rare metal directly from a stream of water flowing over the zinc/indium ore bearing rocks. Still unsure as to why there would be an unusually high concentration of Indium, Harry was not bothered. All he had to do was make sure the tanks collected the water at the right time and flow rate and then run a solar powered concentration process on site remotely. Every year he would go up the mountain and collect, just in time for Christmas.
This year things were not working out. The collection timing was wrong, all the equipment was working, but the collections were just not making it.
"Sally ? - Need you to go up to the old mine site near Lewis Ponds. I'll give you the coordinates on your phone.. no.,. no.. you can't drive there direct.. you got to walk in a bit to get near the base of the waterfall."
"Harry, I've got stuff to do - Christmas is coming and I need to organize the Christmas pageant and other things...., can't you find another way...?"
"Sal, look - it'll only be a couple of days !... take the weekend - nice place to camp actually."
"OK Harry - send me an email with the details. Give me the IP address and security hash key, user name and password for the site so I can logon and check it out before I set off.
Late that evening after the kids had gone to bed, Sally got her laptop fired up and checked out Harry's latest most obscure scheme of Indium mining. The site name was Indigo. From what it looked like, the scheme was autonomous, it had to be she figured, since it was far from any kind of town and halfway up the side of what looked like a rugged mountain. Apparently there was a waterfall there, which flowed most of the time, and then raged down during flood as well. Harry had figured out that at a particular flow-rate, the Indium/Zinc mineral was there in some concentration in the water. Whether it was the tannin from the bark of the gum trees or the action of something else, it was clear that without picking the right time, the water collection, filtration system would just get overloaded. It looked pretty simple. Hundreds of tanks linked to the waterfall sluice gate would be filled up with water and then left to settle out with the action of some basic chemical dosing. The sludge at the bottom of the tank was then passed through to underground storage containers - located under the tanks. There was a control system associated with the tank level, a control system related to the diversion gate, and a central Remote Terminal Unit which was programmed to manage the whole thing. Al the IO was wireless which consisted of wireless tank level sensors and some other strange acoustic ones as well. ES5, ES6, etc... on the diagram.
Sally googled Indium and Skyped Harry as well.
"Harry - I know it's late mate, but what's with the sound sensors ? What's that all about ?"
"Sal, look that is the secret sauce here. The sound sensors pick up the sound in the environment, pass it directly through a sound processor in the RTU and from that you can help pick the right time to do a bunch of things, but more importantly bypass the tanks when the weather comes in.
"Harry, if you are going to help me out here, then you need to let me know a bit more about the recipe for your secret Christmas sauce."
"OK Sally, look it does a lot of different checks but the main thing is that the acoustic detector picks up the sound of rain falling as well as the sound of the waterfall. Based on these different sounds, it can judge the right time to open the gates and when to operate the controls."
Next morning Sally took the 4WD and drove about 3 hours to get near the Lewis Ponds site. The old mine, not much happening, and got texting to Harry, who sent through the GPS coordinates. Shifting the 4WD to do exactly that - Sally drove carefully up the old bush track to Harry's secret Indigo site.
As it happens it had been raining the week before and the ground was a little muddy and waterlogged in places. Sally arrived at Indigo about an hour later.
The sound of falling water filled the air along with the mist around the base of the waterfall. Sally could smell the metal of the galvanized water tanks which are dotted throughout the bush nearby. Each of these tanks had been instrumented with sensors and their water levels transmitted via a small hut in the clearing. The hut was topped with a 10 meter tower with a Yagi pointing south west somewhere, presumably to Harry, a Satellite dish and a solar panel. It seems there are numerous tanks but no taps and only a collection arm which radiates from a central point near the waterfall. Apart from the waterfall, all was pretty quiet.
The site itself looked in good shape, no rust, nothing major broken, wires ok, sensors still attached. Sally attached the laptop to the RTU and then downloaded all of what had happened over the past year. Checked out the audio files, seemed ok, checked out the tank levels, all of them dry and bypassed over the past month.
Tired from hours of sitting with a laptop in broad sunshine, Sally made camp and planned to stay the night.
Next early dawn the stars were still out and the sun was just moving up into the early cool sky. It had grown quiet and the sound of the waterfall had quieted to a trickle.
Sally thought she would call up her kids to say hello.
"Hey Jake, you up ?... still thinking about that....maybe... No it's not raining here anymore". "Anyway I can't figure out what's wrong with this system up here and I might have to stay another day. Do you mind too much.?"
"It's ok mum, just make sure you collect a few Cicada's for me", said Jack.
Then as the sun came up and the temperature increased, the sound of Cicada's warming up. Thousands of male Cicada's calling and gradually becoming louder and louder till it became a continuous throbbing noise. Sally grabbed some noise cancelling headphones and just turned them on. Some relief !.. So this site has been operating 7 years or so..without any trouble, till now.....
Sally went over to the RTU, started recording the Cicada's - created a new sound recognition file. Called it "Christmas Cicada" then programmed the Fuzzy Controller to 'Ignore Cicadas'. Closing the door on the RTU kiosk, there walking over her hand was a 'black prince' ... reasonably common, but still. It was Christmas. She put the Cicada in a small cardboard box, jumped into the 4WD and started down the mountain.
Note: A fictitious story and merely illustrative of the sudden increase in availability of sensory input to control systems in the wild. Any resemblance to real people, mining processes or places is entirely unintentional. - Happy Christmas - Illustration - Powerpoint. RGB spectral color of Indigo [75,0,130] and also the color of Indium - a soft rare metal used in the production of LCD and LED displays. Cicada's turn at Christmas time up every 7-15 years here in Sydney.
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