Their story, in their words…
For our Mark Evison Project, we have created a mini weather station which is in theory self-sufficient in terms of power and the data collected from the weather station is used to create a forecast for the probability of precipitation in the next 12 hours, which is the most important aspect of a forecast to us. The station is powered by solar power, with the excess from sunny days stored into a battery. The collected data is stored into a database and processed for the forecast and the outputs are displayed in a web-based UI, for it to be easily accessible via the browser.
We got it working eventually but it had been a very long way. From the very start, due to significant price increases of certain components, we are kind of forced to get around that by getting the cheaper alternatives instead and that we have to adapt our plan around them. The physical assembly had proved to be a much bigger challenge than anticipated since the soldering required had been much more extensive and difficult than we thought, not least that the connectors of the components turned out to be incompatible. For the new hardware, programming on them is somewhat out of our expertise and we just have to learn the new language and its libraries for it. We didn’t get around to creating a mobile app that does automatic notification when the likelihood of rain gets too high to save the laundry due to time, which we might revisit in the future.
Overall, it had been an eye-opening experience and it gave us very nice experience and lessons on what it is like to involve and manage a project and to solve the problems along the way, which wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Mark Evison.
