CELog has been updated many times since it was created in 2005 to record CalCOFI (& LTER) cruise data-generating events. Here are some key features & modifications to the program:
- CELog (2005) - Uses GPS date-time lat-lon from either MET or ship's GPS serial feed which is saved every 30secs to the data server by METCapture or GPSCapture (another SIO-CalCOFI authored Windows program).
- CELogGPS (2006) - direct ingestion of the GPS string added by adding a GPS serial module to CELog = CELogGPS. Using a directly connected GPS feed, CELogGPS can parse and serve the GPS string to the data network. One workstation or tablet is configured this way and other eventlog workstations can ingest the currentpos.csv string. If a data network is not available, all versions can run independently if configured with their own GPS feed. GPS format is configured in the celoggps.cfg file.
- Checkbox mode: this feature was added so the event log could "nest" observations. From a list of multiple choices defined by the events.txt (e.g. MMammalEvents.txt), an observation string could be appended with multiple selections from the list. This allowed the event string to be built from a variety of choices - such as whale sighted + blue whale or whale sighted + fin whale then include other annotations.
- In 2015, CELogGPS was modified to work on a touchscreen tablet PC (ASUS Transformer T100TAF). Normally fed by txt files to customize the activities listed, some buttons are hard-coded for certain activities or group of activities. An activity is selected then repeated touches of the button will toggle the activity from "deployed" to "at depth" to "recovered" as appropriate. The Record Event button needs to be pressed to actually log the event.