Research & Development

The SIMOC team is actively engaged in the development of the SIMOC Live sensor array hardware and on-board web interface. Driven by an increasing number of users and their diverse deployments, the intent is to provide a robust visualization interface coupled with a light, functional data administration environment. With a phone or tablet in hand, one can quickly review the data on-board any given SIMOC Live stand-alone sensor array configured for the “stand-alone” mode (on-board DHCP, web service).

Today Kai Staats, project lead for SIMOC, provided the development team with a new User Story to guide redevelopment of the SIMOC Live “stand-alone” unit composed of a Raspberry Pi Zero, one or more Adafruit sensors, and an on-board DHCP server and web interface.

THE STORY
User desires to employ SIMOC Live to monitor air quality in a remote location, far from an urban environment where grid power, cell reception, and radio wifi are not available.

User has deployed multiple units, but the distance between them is too great or obstacles inhibit a mesh network.

a) User will physically visit the field site once per [month, quarter, year].

b) Power is provided to the SIMOC Live unit via [solar, wind, portable battery pack, generator].

c) All data must be stored locally, on-board the SIMOC Live unit.

User returns to each unit, one at a time in succession, to view and/or download data.

If included, an on-board OLED screen provides current status of each primary data collection channel for each sensor. For example, …

The SIMOC team is slowly but surely working to correct a number of small but important issues in the SIMOC experience, as follows:

• Presets
• Front-end library updates and fixes
• Deploying latest version of all libraries
• Designing and prototyping new web dashboard

Born of the Analog Astronaut Community, the World’s Biggest Analog (WBA) is a volunteer-based, two weeks mission in which 16 Moon and Mars habitats across 5 continents will attempt the largest synchronized analog mission ever attempted.

SAM Director of Research Kai Staats brought SIMOC Live to the WBA as one of the proposed science projects. SIMOC Live is a real-time air quality monitoring extension to the SIMOC agent-based model and educational web interface. Once accepted in 2024, the all-volunteer SIMOC team composed of Ezio Melotti, Franco Carbognani, and Shantanu Parmar worked to prepare a fully revised Raspberry Pi image and semi-automated configuration that enables each sensor array, no matter its location on Earth, to direct its data stream to a central repository on server. The Mission Control Center hosted by the Austrian Space Forum is then able to monitor the air quality for all of the habitats on a single computer monitor.

One or more SIMOC Live sensor arrays was shipped to eight habitats on four continents such that a live data broadcast is now providing a single-screen monitor in the Austrian Space Forum’s Mission Control Center. As such, the air quality of each represented habitat is presented in real-time.

This summer is seeing many exciting updates for SIMOC, with an in depth story for each coming soon!

• The SIMOC Live development team continue to improve the code and test the platform, with the original and new 64-bit Raspberry Pi Zeros tested and functional.
    
• Several new Adafruit sensors are being tested, including light intensity, a microphone, and IR sensor for proximity awareness. The goal is to give SIMOC Live the ability to capture movement inside a habitat such that the approximate location of the crew members can be correlated to CO2 levels in each room, but without video capture or individual identity tracking.
    
• An Adafruit GPS and accelerometer are being tested as well, looking to a future in which SIMOC Live may be redesigned as a hand-held unit or deployed in a pressure suit during EVAs.
    
• The Arizona Science Center is installing an interactive SIMOC Live kiosk! More to come, soon!
    
• The Analog Astronaut Conference has accepted our proposal for SIMOC Live to be deployed in each of the nine habitats world-wide as a ELCSS monitoring system. While each habitat already has some level of air quality monitoring, the installation of SIMOC Live across the entire domain will provide a singular data format and seamless, (delayed) real-time monitoring from the central Mission Control Center.
    
• Ezio and Franco will venture to Poland to install SIMOC Live at the famous Lunares habitat analog for their upcoming mission for the month of September. This will be a proof of concept for remote monitoring of a habitat beyond SAM.  
• The National Science Teachers Association will soon publish a feature article about SIMOC—stay tuned!

Again, each of the above will be expanded into individual photo essays … stay tuned!

The new SIMOC Live version 2.0 now incorporates an ad hoc, mesh network, with full data redundancy across all nodes. Sensor arrays built on a Raspberry Pi Zero and Adafruit sensors captured data in each of the four primary nodes of SAM: lung, Test Module, Engineering Bay, and Crew Quarters.

More photos, data, and a complete story coming soon!

For now, visit samb2.space/blog …

Lead developer of SIMOC Ezio Melotti arrive to SAM at Biosphere 2 mid February. He receive Christopher Murtagh, Systems Architect and colleague of Kai Staats for more than twenty years. Together they built the point-to-point wireless feed from the SAM Operations Center to the Mars yard and into the SAM habitat analog. Chris built a new version of the SAM light-travel time delayed email server while Ezio continued to fine tune the form and function of the latest build of SIMOC Live and its sensor array.

Chris departed and Franco Carbognani arrived, a Sr. Engineer at the VIRGO gravitational wave observatory to work with Ezio on the SIMOC Live ad hoc, full mesh sensor array. This is a vast improvement on the version installed in SAM for the first two crew in that a unique sensor array will now be placed in the SAM lung, Test Module (green house), engineering bay, and crew quarters for a 4x increase in data generation and fidelity in air quality analysis.

To learn more, visit SAM …

As we move into 2024 we simultaneously look forward to our ongoing work in this current development cycle, and what we accomplished in the prior years. As with any open source computer software project, the team continues to shift and reform with some steady, stable members and others who contributed as they were able and then move on.

This brings us into our seventh year of SIMOC development! I first conceived of the project as my Masters research in 2014 but did not actually dive in for three years until attending the International Space University SSP in Cork Ireland simultaneous to two years funding from Arizona State University. This team has enjoyed additional support at the University of Arizona, Biosphere2, and now four years support by the National Geographic Society. We have taken SIMOC into directions I could not have envisioned in 2017 and surely, a few years from now, I will say something similar.

As a project lead my greatest joy is when SIMOC takes on a form and function motivated by one of my team members, and a velocity far greater than I could do on my own. Yet, I am never truly satisfied. My vision and that of my team members is always greater than what are engaging at any given moment. That’s what drives us forward.

As we look to 2024 we see an opportunity to slow down a bit in the actual writing of code and focus more on the quality of our website content, educational material, and guides for developers who will take SIMOC in even directions our own team did not consider.

While this blog may sometimes be left to ponder on its own for several weeks, even a few months at a time, our development team remains engaged with two meetings each week, more than 800 meetings to date.

Do you have talent in Python programming? Do you enjoy creative writing and web content generation? Want to help bring SIMOC into classrooms around the world? We’d love to hear from you …

The Agent-Based Model (ABM) at the heart of SIMOC has been rewritten from scratch for consistency and speed. Over the years, many individuals had contributed to the SIMOC ABM, each bringing their own programming skills and vision for how SIMOC could develop into the future. Now, as we take SIMOC open-source, it’s a good time to remove inconsistencies and establish norms going forward.

Some key features of the updated ABM are:

• A single agent schema is used throughout the entire application: defining the agent, defining the configuration, initializing the ABM, exporting data and saving the ABM. This will greatly reduce the learning curve for new-comers.
• All agent parameters are stored as either `properties` (static, e.g. ‘harvest_ratio’) or `attributes` (dynamic, e.g. ‘daily_growth_factor’). Besides streamlining the code, this will make the SIMOC web app compatible with custom agents out-of-the-box.
• Unit testing and documentation are incorporated from the start.

We’re seeing up to 85% speedup for large simulations, meaning it’s much faster for users and the demand on our servers is lower.

Altogether, the new ABM is a tremendous upgrade for our users, and puts us on a better footing for long-term growth and collaboration.