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jbrzusto / TO_DO

sensorgnome / motus TODO list for jbrzusto
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Lotek timezone #132

Open zcrysler opened 7 years ago

zcrysler commented 7 years ago

project 32, Zara Dowling - all her Lotek receivers were set to her local time in the field, but it's coming back labelled as UTC so all her detections are off by 4 hours. She can fix this in her detection data, but it means that all other tags detected on these receivers are giving other users the wrong time.

Is there a way to determine what timezone a receiver is set to from the raw data files? This could apply to an unknown amount of other Lotek receivers

jbrzusto commented 7 years ago

Perhaps the manuals for the Lotek receivers have something about this? I don't know how time is set on them. I haven't seen any indication in the .DTA files of a time zone, so my guess is people simply set the date/time to whatever they wish directly, and that's how it comes out. If so, there won't be any way to tell automatically from the .DTA file what correction is required to get GMT.

jbrzusto commented 7 years ago

I've added an issue for how to deal with this on my end: jbrzusto/find_tags#45 But to make that work, we'll need Zara to supply a table of receivers and time periods over which to make the correction. e.g.:

serno from to correctionHours
Lotek-123 2017-01-01 2018-04-01 4
Lotek-456 2017-04-01 2018-04-01 4

so 4 would be the number of hours to add to the timestamp in the .DTA files to get from local time to GMT, for each receiver over the specified date range.

cjardine-bsc commented 7 years ago

Hi John,

If there is no way to tell from the detection file what timezone the receiver is set to, we should probably deal with this issue on our end. As we may need to contact users of Lotek receivers to see what time zone they have set their sensors to. This is something we'll have to store in the metadata (as you outline above). It will probably take a while for this information to trickle in from users, so instead of you reprocessing batches each time we get this information from users I suspect that Denis will prefer we just adjust the timestamps you send us on our end.

I'll confirm with Denis.