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open-eio / Open-Pipe-Kit-Project

Documentation and planning for the Open Pipe Kit. An OPK is a device that pipes data from sensors to anywhere you want, no programming required.
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Use case: Weather station #5

Open chrowe opened 9 years ago

chrowe commented 9 years ago

Wondering what it would take to build a DIY version of one of these http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/buyingguide.asp using a single pi and multiple sensors and then pipe the data to wunderground as the repository.

Getting on site weather data seems like it would be helpful since micro climates can differ from the closest weather station significantly.

Possible sensors

rjcorwin commented 9 years ago

This is an interesting use case to keep in mind because...

  1. There are a lot of sensors on weather stations which immediately pushes the envelope towards having more than one sensor per device.
  2. A weather station is a commonly requested application in the IoT. The feedback @lthiery and I received on the Apitronics Wireless Platform was "focus on building a weather station!"
  3. There are also interesting architectural directions that this use case may draw out. Is a Pipe a "Gateway" like the Apitronics Hive and Libelium Meshlium? Or is a Pipe a "Mote" like the Apitronics Bee and Libelium Waspmote? Weather stations in farm fields often need to have a low power profile so devices such as the Apitronics Bee are a great thing to be paired with a bundle of Weather Station-like sensors. But maybe solar panel and battery technology have become so affordable that power profile difference between something that runs Linux (ie. Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black) and an Apitronics Bee is a non-issue.

My gut feeling right now (while being aware that statements like this can blow scope out of the water) is that a Pipe can be both a Mote and/or a Gateway. We can develop Source/Thing/Sensor drivers (whatever we are calling those things) that pick up on wireless signals from a Mote and we can also develop Source/Thing/Sensor drivers that pick up on signals sent over serial/gpio/etc. Is there really a difference between a wireless device and a wired device? We will see I guess ;-).

Aside from the "What does this mean for OPK???" question, the http://www.weewx.com/ project has reverse engineered the wireless protocol of a ton of commercial weather stations. This would be amazing material for building OPK compatible drivers.