SUN WATCHER 1

Solar-powered weather watcher and a machine that can call it

2024
Collaborator:

Henrique Stockler

Solar-powered weather watcher at the Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York

A calling machine that can call the watcher from anywhere

Table of contents:

1 The Sun Watcher
2 The Calling Station
3 Networking

This project is made up of three parts: a solar-powered weather watcher installed in a parking lot, a calling machine that can call the watcher and get a weather report in real-time, and a networking system that connects them.

What they do: When you press a button on the calling machine, the watcher will be put on the phone. The watcher will then report the weather data in real-time with voice and generate a receipt on the calling machine.

Everything is intended to be made look old. We played around with the theme that solar-powered machines are self-sustaining. We decided to create something that resembled a lost robot sent out in the 80s, paired with an already-broken radio caller, except that it was wifi that we actually used.

1 The Sun Watcher

The sun watcher is mounted with four sensors: a light sensor, a humidity and temperature sensor, an air pressure sensor, and an air quality sensor. The sensors are powered by a battery, which is charged by a solar panel when there is sun. An Arduino Nano 33IoT is used to control the sensors' sleep and connect them to the Internet.
This was installed in a parking lot at the New Lab at Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York.

The sensor's container is carefully designed to withstand various kinds of weather conditions while allowing readings from all the light and air-related sensors. The design is far from being well-rounded and professional in a long-term perspective, but it did carry us through the entire project, which lasted for about a month.
The case is made from clear acrylic sheets by laser cutting. There are large holes on the sides to allow ventilation and small holes at the bottom to drain any water that gets in. The top piece hangs over the edge to prevent rain from getting inside.

As for the battery and Arduino, they went inside a waterproof case provided by Voltaic.

To save energy consumption, the system sleeps when being in idle. Every five minutes, it wakes up and updates the weather data to the server, and then goes back to sleep.

2 The Calling Station

We fabricated the entire calling machine ourselves. My partner Henrique did most of the case fabrication, and I did the internal circuits. The machine has one interactive button, one broken screen, one speaker, and one thermal printer.

When the button is pressed, the machine will connect to the weather watcher and request a weather report. Below is a video showing how it works:

The thermal printer will generate a transcript of the report after it is over.

3 Networking

The server is based on Node-red and hosted on a cloud service. The Sun Watcher sends all weather data to the server every five minutes, where it is converted into a verbal report through Sam-js. When you press the button on the caller, it will fetch the audio file from the server, download it, and stream it.

Besides connecting the caller to the watcher, the server also serves as the networking center for other projects shared by the entire Energy class. All data sent by the remote solar projects are collected through an MQTT broker (credit to Kai who built the broker) and stored in a SQLite database. I also built a web client that can be used to retrieve data from the database and search through it.
A proxy is used for the server, and the domain is encrypted to enhance security.

HTML

The web client that can access the database

Special thanks:

ITP Energy Class of 2024
Jeffrey Feddersen
Yonathan Rozin
Voltaic

- Site construction, Research & Communication
- Energy teacher
- Networking teacher
- Equipment & Location

~~Upcomming Event~~