It has been a while since my last update, so I wanted to share some news about what has been happening behind the scenes. Rikitraki has been running quietly and reliably since 2016, and over the past few months I’ve been working on something that has been on my mind for a long time: a full refresh of the backend. The original system — a Node/Express app running on a dedicated VM with MongoDB — served amazingly well for almost a decade.

I am pleased to share the outcome of my recent collaboration with Provita: a portal for biodiversity data in Venezuela.

The portal was created to make it easier to access data records of Venezuelan species on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) platform, as well as data generated by Provita’s own projects. The goal is to make this information more widely available to researchers, students, and the general public.

In my previous post, I introduced the Oregon Drinking Watersheds project and I described the web application in detail. In this post, I will discuss the process we used to compile the data.

Who’s drinking water is influenced by any given spot on the map?

That is the question Oregon Wild wants to be able to answer at a moment’s notice, and that’s the subject of my latest volunteer project.

Oregon Wild needs the data and a tool, to help understand the full extent of Oregon’s drinking watersheds and which populations are connected to any given Oregon location through common watersheds.

As I mentioned on my previous post, I got an Arduino kit to start experimenting with the platform and eventually interconnect it with the Snap Circuits so that my grandkids and I can have fun building some cool projects. The kit includes an Arduino Mega2560 board and a bunch of components that can be used to build a variety of projects.

It is pretty easy to get started with the Arduino platform. You install the Arduino IDE, plug in the board to your computer using the USB cable, and boom! you are up and running in minutes. I am using the new version 2 of the IDE, and so far it has been very stable.

And now for something completely different and out of the blue.

I couple of months ago, I started playing Snap Circuits with my 6-year old grandson. These things are truly a terrific way for children to learn and get their hands into some electronic circuitry. Then I decided to start augmenting their capabilities by getting an Arduino board and some sensors, so that we could further enhance our projects – my plan is to gently introduce him to the concepts as we exhaust what is possible to do with just the Snap Circuits kits alone.

As I started playing with the Arduino board, I went into the rabbit hole of using a Real Time Operating System (RTOS) to program the microcontroller. And then poof, it was like traveling back in time to 1979 when I was working on my electronic engineering thesis project…

Provita Geoportal at FOSS4G 2021, Buenos Aires, Online presentation slides

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I am honored to have the opportunity to present the results of my latest project, the Provita Geoportal, at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), Online the week of August 27 through October 3, 2021.

On this post, I describe the approach used by the Provita Geoportal to pre-generate map preview tiles using a serverless approach.

Why pre-generate tiles?

Traditionally, map tiles are generated dynamically (and cached) using a GIS server. This requires installation, monitoring and maintenance of some server capability, whether it is a physical server somewhere, a hosted virtual machine, or perhaps a container image hosted in some cloud service provider. A solution like this would most likely require hosting database management system as well. And we don’t want any of that!

On my previous post, I gave an overview of the Provita Geoportal from an end-user perspective. On this post, I describe the Admin functionality used by authorized Provita users to add and manage the site’s content.

I am pleased to announce the beta release of my latest volunteer project: the Provita Geoportal. In previous posts I discussed some of the design and implementation details of the project, but I was waiting for the public release of the product to share the end-user and admin functionality of the site.

The purpose of the Geoportal is to enable professionals, researchers, academics and the general public to find, pre-view and download geospatial data sets about Venezuela. These data sets are published by the Provita team and are associated with the organization’s mission and projects.