Working Requirements

What do we want to achieve with the weather stations?

The purpose of this weather station is to help in learning more things about the available land.

When having a large piece of land, some properties vary a little around the land, so it would be nice to know more about it to make the best use of the available conditions!

There are many things that would be nice to know, but for the purpose of starting a new community on the land, these have been chosen as the most relevant one to begin with:

1. how much water we could collect
2. how much power we could get with solar
3. where it would be best to put solar
4. where it would be best to put wind turbines
5. where it would be best to put the vans the kitchen or the workspace
6. how much the human presence is impacting the land

...more important things to know would be where to put crops and greenhouses, how much water flows in the rivers etc. but at the moment these are not a focus of the project yet.

What parameters are we going to measure and where?

What?

To achieve this we chose to measure the following parameters:

• rainfall [1]
• solar radiation [2]
• ambient light [3,5]
• wind intensity [4]
• wind direction [4]
• temperature [3,5]
• humidity [1,5]
• acoustic sound level [5,6]

(... soil temperature and humidity would help for choosing where to plant crops, but still, a.t.m. not a requirement)

Where?

Some parameters do not change much over a (relatively speaking) small piece of land of a few hectares. For example, rainfall and maximum available solar irradiated power will be the same anywhere there is a full sight of the sky (a condition that you would for sure check when choosing a location for panels and rain collection).

• rainfall and sun irradiation can be measured just in a single position

But other parameters will need to be measured in many positions:

• temperature, humidity, sunlight (shade/sunrise/sunset), wind intensity and direction, noise levels

...from this observation it only makes sense to have a system with one single more complex node, measuring all the parameters, wirelessly connected to other simpler nodes. Given a starting requirement is of at least 4 total positions, we could use 1 "master" node and 3 slave nodes.

Power requirements

The nodes will need to be fully self sufficient. Each node will need a power harvesting system and a power storage system onboard.

Costs, manufacturing and future-proofing

In average the nodes would need to cost about 150€. Having 4 nodes we could try to arrange the total budget of 600€ to be 220€ for the master and 125€ for the other nodes.

For manufacturing, 3D printing, recycling and upcycling of materials are considered as a long term requirement of the project. To improve the possibility of expanding and tailoring the system to anyone needs, it might be helpful to achieve a high degree of DIY-ability for the project.

For future proofing, it would be welcome to include OTA updates, expansion plugs for general connection ports as SPI and I2C.