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DATA COLLECTING WEATHER STATION FOR NASA GLOBE EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM

PROBLEM >>>

NASA GLOBE* does not provide weather data instrumentation.
Current weather stations on the market cost about $400 on average.
There are no alternatives of the same quality and use (roof-mounted, permanent, periodic standalone data collection)
There is a current lack of engineering appreciation and real-world data analysis in schools, as well as a general public ignorance about weather and climate as they pertain to the environment.

How can we incorporate mechanical and electrical engineering skills and data collection into high school curriculum, unite it with general climate science, and contribute to GLOBE's mission in an affordable, accurate, and hands-on way for students?

*GLOBE, the Global Learning and Observations to benefit the Environment Program, is a worldwide program to encourage science, environmental learning and data collection. Local measurements and observations are submitted to the GLOBE system, which are compiled globally to "create a worldwide resource for conducting scientific inquiry; some measurements serve as ground truth for NASA satellite data products".

SOLUTION >>>

DESIGN & ITERATIONS >>>

All electrical components were integrated on a breadboard using the ESP8266 and the Arduino software and IDE. Code was either created or found and tweaked to take a data point (temperature, pressure, and humidity) every five minutes and plot it in real-time on the IoT data analytics platform, ThingSpeak. The Arduino Uno board was able to be omitted entirely, and all sensors combined, cutting costs significantly. The system includes a small solar panel and battery for continuous power and operation.

CHALLENGES

ELECTRONICS

MECHANICS AND STRUCTURE

See the finished instruction manual HERE.

This includes the overall weather station structure and roof mounting, the radiation shield and mounting, electronics housing design, the built from scratch anemometer for wind speed data, and integrating its electrical components (encoder, photo interrupter, etc.) with the rest of the system.

Provide Providence Rhode Island Public Schools and Fenway High School with a low-cost weather-instrumentation kit suitable for use in high school education. Aspects of the project include choosing and designing weather sensors (temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed), wifi connectivity for continuous data upload, electrical housing design, roof-mounting mechanism, and an instruction manual. The accompanying instruction manual includes a BOM, options to accommodate for school funds, tools, and materials and difficulty level, open-source Arduino code, open-source CAD models.

Resource, tool and material limitations. This is because high schools have neither the budget, machining/fabrication resources, and technological knowledge to create complex designs.

Integration of the sensor, wifi, and anemometer hardware with the mechanical system. Everything must be weatherproofed, and this can be difficult with electronics sensitive to the outside environment, but also require ventilation, electromagnetic and radiation shielding by the nature of being a method of instrumentation, as well as to mitigate extreme outdoor influences on data (rooftop heat radiation, rain, signal interference, wind, etc. without changing the data input for accurate data collection.

Roof mounting. Must accommodate all rooftops, but not be resource intensive

Educational effectiveness. The process must be documented and explained well as part of a high school introductory engineering curriculum. Testing was done when Fenway High school tried building the electrical prototype at Boston University.