The Macroscope Data Logger Designer

@techreport{hamilton2026macroscope, author = {Hamilton, Michael P., Ph.D.}, title = {The Macroscope Data Logger Designer}, institution = {Canemah Nature Laboratory}, year = {2026}, number = {CNL-TN-2026-052}, month = {april}, url = {https://canemah.org/archive/document.php?id=CNL-TN-2026-052}, abstract = {The original Climate Analyst Data Logger Designer (CNL-TN-2026-052 v0.1) specified a Climate-Analyst-internal wizard that provisioned virtual weather instruments by inserting rows into MySQL `sensor\_platforms` and `monitoring\_sources` tables; a single launchd collector on Galatea then discovered the new platforms and began hourly ingestion into vendor-specific reading tables. That design has been overtaken by two converging changes. First, the Macroscope substrate has migrated from MySQL to Postgres + TimescaleDB + PostGIS (CNL-TN-2026-056, CNL-TN-2026-066), collapsing the dual-database YEA / MNG architecture into a unified `nexus` + `public` schema layout, replacing vendor-wide reading tables with two canonical hypertables (`public.reading` and `public.detection`), and replacing INSERT IGNORE with ON CONFLICT idempotency. Second, the rest of the Macroscope Collaboratory has matured into a multi-Lab research environment whose other instruments (Site Finder, Climate Analyst, Habitat Analyst, Panorama, Biodiversity Analyst, and the in-development Acoustic Phenology Lab 06) all want to provision new data sources from inside their own analytical context — not by leaving for a sidebar in a different Lab. This v2 specification responds to both pressures. The Data Logger Designer is reframed as a substrate-native, cross-Lab callable surface — the Macroscope Workflow Designer's first occupant — that any Lab can invoke as a modal/drawer with pre-filled provisioning context. The three-tier instrument hierarchy from v0.1 (physical → community → model-derived) is preserved as a generalizable pattern and re-grounded with worked examples in **four** domains: Earth (weather, climate, soil), Life (acoustic detection, observation feeds, range models), Home (built-environment sensors, household air quality, household energy), and Self (wearables, social activity feeds, derived health models). The single-collector architecture survives the substrate transition with two changes: the runtime decision is explicitly deferred to Phase 2 of the Macroscope migration plan (CNL-FN-2026-054 §6.3), and the collector now writes to two canonical hypertables differentiated by event semantics — continuous metric *readings* versus event-typed *detections*. v2 additionally treats privacy as a first-class architectural concern (§6): the four-domain spread divides cleanly along an access axis (Earth/Life are place-subject and shareable by default; Home/Self are household/person-subject and private by default), and DLD encodes this through subject\_type, ownership, visibility tiers, a grants table, and Postgres row-level security. The result is an operational pattern in which provisioning a new monitoring instrument anywhere in the curated catalog, in any of the four Macroscope domains, is a database transaction mediated by a wizard the user reaches without leaving the Lab they were working in — and with the correct privacy posture from the moment the substrate write completes.} }