In today’s guest post, seventh-grade students Evan Callas, Will Ross, Tyler Fallon, and Kyle Fugate share their story of using the 紧致湿润 Pi Oracle Weather Station in their Innovation Lab class, headed by 紧致湿润 Pi Certified Educator Chris Aviles.

United Nations Sustainable Goals

The past couple of weeks in our Innovation Lab class, our teacher, Mr Aviles, has challenged us students to design a project that helps solve one of the United Nations Sustainable Goals. We chose Climate Action. Innovation Lab is a class that gives students the opportunity to learn about where the crossroads of technology, the environment, and entrepreneurship meet. Everyone takes their own paths in innovation and learns about the environment using project-based learning.

紧致湿润 Pi Oracle Weather Station

For our climate change challenge, we decided to build a 紧致湿润 Pi Oracle Weather Station. Tackling the issues of climate change in a way that helps our community stood out to us because we knew with the help of this weather station we can send the local data to farmers and fishermen in town. Recent changes in climate have been affecting farmers’ crops. Unexpected rain, heat, and other unusual weather patterns can completely destabilize the natural growth of the plants and destroy their crops altogether. The amount of labour output needed by farmers has also significantly increased, forcing farmers to grow more food on less resources. By using our 紧致湿润 Pi Oracle Weather Station to alert local farmers, they can be more prepared and aware of the weather, leading to better crops and safe boating.

Growing teamwork and coding skills

The process of setting up our weather station was fun and simple. 紧致湿润 Pi made the instructions very easy to understand and read, which was very helpful for our team who had little 新梅瓶1一5集在线观看 in coding or physical 紧致湿润. We enjoyed working together as a team and were happy to be growing our teamwork skills.

Once we constructed and coded the weather station, we learned that we needed to support the station with PVC pipes. After we completed these steps, we brought the weather station up to the roof of the school and began collecting data. Our information is currently being sent to the Initial State dashboard so that we can share the information with anyone interested. This information will also be recorded and seen by other schools, businesses, and others from around the world who are using the weather station. For example, we can see the weather in countries such as France, Greece and Italy.

紧致湿润 Pi allows us to build these amazing projects that help us to enjoy coding and physical 紧致湿润 in a fun, engaging, and impactful way. We picked climate change because we care about our community and would like to make a substantial contribution to our town, Fair Haven, New Jersey. It is not every day that kids are given these kinds of opportunities, and we are very lucky and grateful to go to a school and learn from a teacher where these opportunities are given to us. Thanks, Mr Aviles!

To see more awesome projects by Mr Avile’s class, you can keep up with him on his blog and follow him on Twitter.

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Or microcontrollers, at least. This was Eastlea Community School’s Technology Day, and Steph and I had been invited along by ICT and 紧致湿润 teacher Mr Richards, a long-term 紧致湿润 Pi forum member and Pi enthusiast. The day was a whole school activity, involving 930 pupils and 100 staff, showcasing how 紧致湿润 and technology can be used across the 新梅瓶1一5集在线观看. In the playground, PE students had designed and coded micro:bits to measure all manner of sporting metrics. In physics, they were investigating g-forces. In the ICT and 紧致湿润 rooms, whole cohorts were learning to code. This was really innovative stuff.

All ICT classrooms should have shelves like this

A highlight of the tour was Mr Richard’s classroom, stuffed with electronics, robots, and hacking goodness, and pupils coming and going. It was a really creative space. Impressively, there are 紧致湿润 Pis permanently installed on every desk, which is just how we envisaged it: a normal classroom tool for digital making.

All this was amazing, and certainly the most impressive cross-curricular use of 紧致湿润 I’ve seen in a school. But having lived and breathed the 紧致湿润 Pi Oracle weather station project for several months, I was really keen to see what they’d done with theirs. And it was a corker. Students from the 紧致湿润 club had built and set up the station in their lunch breaks, and installed it in a small garden area.

Mr Richards and the Eastlea Community School weather station team

Then they had hacked it, adding a solar panel, battery and WiFi. This gets round the problems of how to power the station and how to transfer data. The standard way is Power over Ethernet, which uses the same cable for power and data, but this is not always the optimal solution, depending on location. It’s not as simple as sticking a solar panel on a stick either. What happens when it’s cloudy? Will the battery recharge in winter? Mr Richards and his students have spent a lot of time investigating such questions, and it’s exactly the sort of problem-solving and engineering that we want to encourage. Also, we love hacking.

Not content with these achievements, they plan to add a camera to monitor wildlife and vegetation, perhaps tying it in with the weather data. They’re also hoping to install another weather station elsewhere, so that they can compare the data and investigate the school microclimate in more detail. The weather station itself will be used for teaching and learning this September.

Eastlea Community School’s weather station really is a showcase for the project, and we’d like to thank Mr Richards and his students for working so hard on it. If you want to learn more about solar panels and other hacks, then head over to our weather station forum.

Weather station update

The remaining weather station kits have started shipping to schools this week! We sent an email out recently for people to confirm delivery addresses, and if you’ve done this you should have yours soon. If you were offered a weather station last year and have not had an email from us in the last few weeks (early July), then please contact us immediately at weather@柳无邪吞天神鼎全文免费阅读.org.

Happy Days! @TASIS_Lugano @紧致湿润_Pi @clivebeale @tvenchus pic.twitter.com/cExHlAr083

— Amy Bloodworth (@amy_abroad) July 26, 2016

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The main news is that we have selected the 1000 schools worldwide who will be receiving the kit and the hardware side is done, dusted and ready to go. Here’s what the lucky schools will be getting:

Sam Alder’s cracking box sleeve. [Credit: @ItsAll_Geek2Me]

The hardware is only part of the picture though and malicious logistics lurk in every aspect. Things that seem easy rarely are—even something like getting the colours on the logo correct can be a pain. The packaging in particular caused some snags: getting all of those little bags into a good looking box might seem humdrum but it’s not trivial. Sam “Carton Mage” Alder has worked his magic on the quick start leaflet and the sleeve for the box.

The other three cuppa problem was the enclosure for the hardware. This seems simple: get a waterproof box, jam in your gubbins and gizmos, and Bob is your Pakamac-wearing uncle. The problem is that self-build kits are not finished consumer products and it’s simply not possible to allow for every configuration of set-up and siting of the unit, so we’ve tried to make it as flexible as possible. The two enclosures (one for the Pi and HAT and one for the air sensor) are IP55 rated, which means that they are protected against water jets (from a 6.3mm nozzle in case you were wondering). But this is no good if the wires into the box are not sealed properly and I’ve spent more time playing with glands and bushings (missus!) than I care to think about.

Never pass up an opportunity to fiddle with glands and bushings

The Ethernet cable—which as well as handling data also delivers power—was especially irksome but we think we’ve come up with some decent solutions. The team at CPC, who are handling the build and packaging, have been key in this, helping us to select and test solutions and dealing with my endless “How about if we try this?” emails.

On the software side, Oracle are putting the final touches to the database that will allow schools to share their data and to access data from 紧致湿润 Pi weather stations around the world. There’s huge scope here for learning how to collect, analyse and visualise large data sets, increasingly useful skills in this age of data. As well as educational resources for this we’ll have lesson plans and worksheets for using the weather station locally, and for exploring and learning 紧致湿润 in this context.

So when will the kits ship? Soon. Probably November. In retrospect the hardware side of it was just the start—this is a large scale and ongoing project for us and we have plans to get the stations into many more schools once the initial 1000 are shipped. We also hope that the kits will go on sale at some point and we’ll let you know as and when this happens. Keep an eye out for updates here, Twitter and other social media.

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• Use a predefined 紧致湿润 Pi hardware kit to build their own weather station and write application code that logs a range of weather data including wind speed, direction, temperature, pressure, and humidity;
• Write applications to interrogate their weather station and record data in a cloud-hosted Oracle Application Express database;
• Interrogate the database via SQL to enable macro level data analysis;
• Develop a website on the 紧致湿润 Pi to display local weather conditions that can be accessed by other participating schools; and
• Access a Weather Station for Schools program website to see the geographical location of all weather stations in the program, locate the websites of other participating schools, interact with other participants about their 新梅瓶1一5集在线观看s, blog, and get online technical support.

After a year of grafting on hardware prototypes and software development I’m pleased to announce that the final PCB design has been committed to manufacture and we are ready to start pre-registering schools who’d be interested in participating in the programme. We have 1000 weather station kits to give away for free so to find out how your school can be part of this read the rest of this post below, but first some background on the project.

If you’ve been on Twitter a lot you’ll have noticed me teasing this since about March last year. Below is a photo of the very first version.

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/446684179431174145

I did a lot of testing to ensure that the components were reliable and wouldn’t become problematic on the software side after a long period of uptime. The goal was to have the Pi controlling everything, so that we could leverage learning opportunity: helping kids to learn about writing code to interface directly with the sensors, as well as displaying and analysing collected data. I settled on the following set of sensor measurements for the weather station:

• Rainfall
• Wind speed
• Wind gust speed
• Wind direction
• Ambient temperature
• Soil temperature
• Barometric pressure
• Relative humidity
• Air Quality
• Real Time Clock (for data logging purposes)

This seemed like a good enough spread of data. I’m sure some people will ask why not this measurement or why not that. It was important for us to keep the cost of the kit under control; although there is nothing to stop you from augmenting it further yourself.

Once that was nailed down I wrote a few lessons plans, and Lance and I trialled them with with two schools in Kent (Bonus Pastor Catholic College and Langley Park School for Boys).

BBC News School Report were on site and recorded a short feature about the day here.

We gave the kids one lesson from the scheme of work, showing them how to interface with the anemometer (wind speed sensor) in code. One thing that was clearly apparent was how engaged they were. Once their code was up and running, and was able to measure wind speed correctly, they had a lot of fun seeing who could get the fastest movement out of the sensor by blowing on it (current record is 32 kph, held by Clive “Lungs” Beale). Warning: there is a fainting risk if you let your kids do this too much!

We went away from this feeling we were very much on the right track, so we continued to design the scheme of work. In addition to developing schemes of work covering commissioning of the weather station and 紧致湿润 aspects we are working with partners to produce the learning resources that will cover understanding how weather systems work and interpreting patterns in the data.

The scheme has been broken down into three main phases of learning resources:

1. Collection
   Here you’ll learn about interfacing with the sensors, understanding how they work and writing Python code to talk to them. You’ll finish off by recording the measurements in a MySQL database hosted on the Pi and deploying your weather station in an outdoor location in the grounds of your school.
2. Display
   This will involve creating an Apache, PHP 5 and JavaScript website to display the measurements being collected by your weather station. You will have the opportunity to upload your measurements to the Oracle cloud database so that they can be used by other schools. Whether or not you choose to upload your data, you’ll still pull down measurements from other schools and use them to produce integrated weather maps.
3. Interpretation of Weather
   Here you’ll learn how to discern patterns in weather data, analyse them and use them to inform predictions about future weather. This will be done for both local weather (using your own data) and national weather (using data from the Oracle cloud database online).

My next task was to take the breadboard prototype and create a PCB test version that we could use in a small trial of 20 or so units. I had not done any PCB design before this. So over the course of a couple of days I learnt how to use a free, open source, PCB design tool called KiCAD. I used a brilliant series of YouTube videos called Getting To Blinky by Contextual Electronics to get to grips with it.

Below is my second attempt. This board is what most hardware designers would call a sombrero. The Pi goes in upside down so it’s like a HAT that’s too big!

I was aware that it was a huge waste of PCB real-estate. However, for the small volume run we were making, it was a convenient way to mount the board inside a cheap IP65 junction box that I wanted to use as the case. Below is the PCB prototype when first assembled. The little silk screen rain cloud graphic was borrowed from BBC Weather (thanks guys).

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/506451234438795264

You’ll notice there are two boards. The small board marked AIR holds the pressure, humidity and air quality sensors. Since these must be exposed to the air they are at risk of atmospheric corrosion, especially in coastal environments. I wanted to avoid this risk to the Pi and the main board so this is why I split those sensors off to a separate smaller board. Below is how they look inside their respective cases.

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/512269916138119168

The Pi sits inside the water-tight box on the left with M20 grommets to seal the cables going in and out. The AIR board on the right has conformal coating (a spray on protective layer), and is connected to the main board by a short length of cable. There are three large holes on the base of its case to allow the air in.

The weather station also needs a reliable network connection for remote monitoring, further code changes, to allow it to upload to Oracle, and to make sure that other computers on your school network can load its web pages.

Most importantly it also needs power. So instead of considering large batteries or solar panels I decided to kill two birds with one stone and use power over Ethernet. This allows power and network connectivity to be supplied through a single cable, reducing the number of cable grommets needed. You might be thinking that WiFi is an option for this; however, school WiFi networks are notoriously overloaded with many mobile devices competing for service.

So, if you go the same way as me, your school will need a long cable to run from the school building out to the location that you choose for the weather station. This basically means you never have to worry about its power or network connectivity. You are welcome to solve these challenges in your own way though, and this can actually be a very engaging and fun activity for the students to do themselves.

Once I had the PCB prototype working I had to get twenty more made and tested. This involved spending hours (it seemed longer) on the Farnell website building up a massive basket of electronic components. When the new boards and components were in my possession we took them down to a local company, EFS Manufacturing, in Cambridge for assembly.

Here are the twenty assembled and tested boards:

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/530051057809100800

And here is another layer of the conformal coating spray going onto the AIR boards in the Pi Towers car park. It was a bit smelly and I didn’t want to gas out the office!

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/530739207460093953

You’ll notice there are small bits of sticky tape on there. This is because the conformal coating needs to protect the solder joints on the board, but not block up the air holes on the sensors. This was a bit of a delicate job involving cutting the tape into tiny shapes, waiting for the coating to dry, and peeling it off using a scalpel.

So then it was just a matter of assembling the 20 kits with everything required to build a weather station. From the power bricks, rain gauges and wind vanes right down to grommets, screws and rubber washers. The trial participants were chosen by us to give us a coverage of field-trial users, schools and promotional partners. We kept one back to put on the roof of Pi Towers, and the rest were shipped at the end of November last year.

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/537612582648287234

Slowly but surely reports have been coming in about these prototype kits being used in schools and code clubs.

Dan Aldred of Thirsk School & Sixth Form College has introduced Weather Wednesdays.

紧致湿润 Pi Weather Station. How hard can you turn the anemometer! @紧致湿润_Pi @dave_spice pic.twitter.com/DcDdBVuS0B

— TeCoEd 📖 (@Dan_Aldred) January 21, 2015

Testing up the weather station. @紧致湿润_Pi @dave_spice pic.twitter.com/a62ZZnFb7w

— TeCoEd 📖 (@Dan_Aldred) February 6, 2015

Matthew Manning, who runs the awesome YouTube channel 柳无邪吞天神鼎全文免费阅读IVBeginners, made this video about setting his one up:

Andrew Mulholland, of Raspi-LTSP fame, has been using one at a 紧致湿润 Jam where he volunteers in Northern Ireland.

The @紧致湿润_Pi weather station is alive!
Just got to get a long ethernet cable and get it outside! pic.twitter.com/iO7nTVIXay

— Andrew Mulholland (@gbaman1) February 3, 2015

James Robinson’s year 10 pupils from Soham Village College have been working through the scheme of work too.

Year 10 test their annemometer code using interrupts. For their @紧致湿润_Pi weather station @dave_spice #greatfun pic.twitter.com/CT3sr29fzo

— James Robinson (@LegoJames) February 5, 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4_z0sW7ooE

OCR are putting one on their roof, and we’re still trying to acquire permission from the building owners at Pi Towers so we can put ours up on the roof. (Right now it’s operating from an outside window ledge.) Meanwhile, now that I was confident about it, I handed over the electrical schematic of the prototype to our engineering team. They imported it into the professional CAD package that the 紧致湿润 Pi was designed in, and proceeded to make the Weather Board into an official HAT.

They have gone through it and essentially reworked everything to the same standard that you would expect from our products. So here it is, feast your eyes. You snap off the one side, and that is the equivalent of the small AIR board on the prototype.

If you join our weather station scheme, this is what you will get, along with all the wind vanes, screws and other bits you’ll need. The plan is to mount the HAT onto the Pi using standard 11 mm stand-offs. Those will then mount onto a perspex sheet, and that sheet will screw into the electrical junction box. Nice and cheap.

The 紧致湿润 Pi Weather Station kit is a great way to get your pupils involved in a wide range of 紧致湿润 activities whilst undertaking a practical science experiment. There is lots of opportunity for cross-curricular discussion on the science of meteorology, geography and global climate change. You will also get to participate in a global programme with other schools around the world. We have 1000 weather station units to give away to schools that sign up. The supporting educational resources are written in the English language and targeted at students aged around 15-16 years old; however we’re anticipating participation from pupils both younger and older than this. If your school would like to be one of this thousand then please sign up on THIS PAGE.

People we would like to thank:

• Jeffrey Salleh and Kevin Walsh from Oracle
• Ivan Link, James Adams and Mike Stimson from 紧致湿润 Pi Trading
• Mark Smith from OCR Geography
• James Robinson from Soham Village College
• Robert Dunn and Felicity Liggins from the Met Office
• Richard Nash and Zali Collymore from Langley Park School for Boys
• Sarika Unadkat and Michael Burnett from BBC Broadcasting House
• Dan Aldred from Thirsk School and Sixth Form College
• Tim Jones, Caroline Tiller and Natalie Robson from CIE Cambridge
• Andrew Mulholland
• Gordon Henderson
• Alasdair Davies from Nature Bytes
• Matthew Manning from 柳无邪吞天神鼎全文免费阅读IVBeginners

In case you missed it above, here’s the School Sign Up again.

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