ESP8266 Drone Atmosphere Sounding
geo_leeman
Posts: 190
Thanks to an editorial error, the November "Multi-rotor Hobbyist" is available on the Servo website for free. Using an ELEV8 to take shallow soundings of the atmosphere in the outflow of a thunderstorm. Also a good excuse to play with an ESP8266 Thing I had around. Article here.
Comments
@erco - turns out there is a large hobby group that tracks and decodes rawinsonde data. Who knew? They are really nice little devices. I remember the models about 10-ish years ago had a battery you soaked in water to activate them.
Aneroid barometer inside, two external metal arms which rotated forward and I believe held a paper strip to measure humidity. Very cool. I always wanted to find one in the wild but I found it at a hamfest instead. See also http://radiosondemuseum.org/photographs/
Parts of the YB-49!? That would be very neat to see.
Author: John Leeman, any relation?
Yep, geo_leeman == John Leeman
Flying in the thunderstorm outflow was very challenging. I wish I had the telemetry recorded, but I'd say it was banked 30 degrees or so into the wind at times to hold position. 100 m up it was even more difficult! I'm excited to get GPS control and do GPS disciplined up/down soundings at controlled rates.
I worked on a project several years back flying helical flight paths with a fixed wing taking environmental soundings, but quads make it so much easier as the runway requirement is gone.
And that is why the base has that name. He was its pilot.
Roger that.
http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/YB-49_crash_site.htm
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mojave-crash-hunter-20130531-dto-htmlstory.html#after-jump
There are other thermodynamics plots too such as the Stuve and Tephigram. The USAF used/uses skew-T's to figure out if an aircraft will leave contrails, etc. You can use them to easily spot thermal inversions too that can trap a smoke plume below a certain altitude. You can see this sometimes when smoke rising from an industrial plant reaches an inversion and has a dead flat top.
I'd be really great if the BME680 ever comes out.... keeps getting pushed back though.
But why is your ground crew all robotic, and from erco's space?
??
Maybe you could get Servo to release the article in PDF to the Propeller community?
Go John!
I've asked the editors if they would release the PDF as a documentation service to the community - I'll update here when I hear back!