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Scott Veirs edited this page Apr 23, 2022 · 11 revisions

Welcome to the orcasite wiki!

History

~2002-2017: mp3 streams + Wordpress

  • Hydrophone nodes used Winamp/Shoutcast plugin to generate an mp3 stream (30 seats max/node)
  • Val built WhoListener (Visual Basic, then QT) to monitor noise levels and automate orca detection
  • orcasound.net used Wordpress for CMS & blog

2017: Kickstarter

  • Raised ~$20k
  • Goal: an open source live-streaming solution and community science project that would scale to conserve orcas

2018: development of an Elixir/Phoenix web app (v1)

  • Design for mobile only
  • Development led by Skander Mzali and Paul Cretu

2019: improved design for desktop web app (v2)

  • Improved desktop UI
  • Development led by Mike Castor
  • Added "I hear something interesting button" for increased community scientist interaction
  • Added admin UI for review of human detections

2020: design for mobile + desktop web app (v3)

  • Team effort from all-volunteer UX/design group, led by Brendan Thatcher
  • Discussion of how to blend live.orcasound.net and content/blog at orcasound.net

2021: development of v3

A concerted effort in 2021 included a new architecture for Orcasound, a transition to the Next.js framework, transfer of content from Wordpress site to static generation of content, and a suite of new features and APIs.

2022: launch of v3, + transition from versions to agile enhancement via individual features

  • 4/22/22 update (lead dev Paul on Slack):

The current live site is in the v2-ui branch. The v3 redesign is in the master branch. The reason you see all the Elixir stuff is because it's still an Elixir app; I'm not removing Elixir for v3, just replacing the frontend (Next.js instead of vanilla react). The folder layout for an elixir app is that all the frontend code goes in the /assets folder. So you'll find the v2 frontend code here.

For v3, I'm planning on completely separating the frontend and backend, so I won't be using the assets folder anymore. Instead I made a folder called /ui where the new Next.js project is (link here). Eventually I want to move everything around and just have two top level folders when you open the repo: /ui and /api. I think that will help people hop in a lot more easily, without being scared away by the backend code.

Google Summer of Code student contributions

Architectural and framework strategy (Paul Cretu, lead)

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