Missouri School for the Deaf Weather Station

MSDTech

·At last, the weather station I've been working on for the last 6 months is in service. I am a Co-op Observer, and when the station was moved from my house to the school it made life a little more difficult. I will admit, I did get a burst of enthusism for this project every Saturday morning when the weather was bad and I had to go into work.
You can see the output at http://weather.msd.k12.mo.us
I wanted to limit the technology used to the types of devices we will be covering in the microcontroller training class I hope to teach next fall (extra-currucular activity as I'm not a teacher). The project did give me a fair amount of experience using and pushing the limits of a BS2.

Dgswaner

Nice work! This looks like a fun project! What would you estimate the cost of this project? just roughly. it's also glad to see a PINK in your project, I think the PINK is the most under utilized item Parallax sells.

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"A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer." - Jamie Hyneman, Myth Buster

DGSwaner

MSDTech

My total cost was about $1100 for the materials. I'm not sure what the cost for the wood for the shelter was. And yes, the PINK was the single most expensive component.

This was a case where it was significantly cheaper to build than to buy. I found a Rain Gage / Scale combination that would measure both rain and snow. The unit had a 0.2v to 2.5v output for a 20" rain capacity. Cost for the unit $1200. I used an old kitchen scale and ADC to get the same results - my cost less than $50. But the homemade still needs to have it's calibration fine tuned. It's running about 25% low compared the the NWS gage sitting next to it. After I have some history, I'll modify the user function in the floating point processor to get the output to match the NWS gage.

Post Edited (MSDTech) : 4/24/2008 4:20:48 PM GMT