News items for tag weatherstation - Koos van den Hout

Another instance of me thinking so seriously about a project that I started a webpage about what I want to do and how and collecting the knowledge and ideas that I already have: building a wardriving box. I first thought of a small PC for project sundial, the self-powered weather station and gps time receiver but I got the idea that this could also make a really nice Wardriving box which would do just that.

I dug up the Conrad weatherstation I'm planning to use as weatherstation in project sundial. I updated the page with information about the order-numbers of the different parts (no longer available from Conrad). So far, most sensors seem ok (although I'm not sure everything is calibrated) but the rain sensor gives absolutely no usable readouts and gives weird numbers for the calibration procedure. The wind speed sensor is a simple revolution counter which will need some software work to convert to average wind speed and wind gusts.

A company in the US, Solis Energy, is producing solar-panel power systems especially geared towards running wireless networking in hard-to-reach places. Sounds like a turn-key version of some of the functionality in my project sundial for a self-powered weather station. Sources: Computerworld Australia: Power Wi-Fi using the sun, says startup Slashdot: Solar Powered Wifi.

I've been thinking about building a weather-station / ntp server with solar power for a while, and decided to start documenting the design, the ideas and the (lack of) progress. Named project sundial because it uses the sun to tell time, just in a somewhat convoluted way.