Project Curacao In the Sun – Solar Power Raspberry Pi/Arduino

Project Curacao has once again been deployed in the Caribbean.   The box was placed in its stand on June 13, 2015 and is now running in

autonomous mode taking pictures, monitoring the environment and happily baking in the sun.

What is Project Curacao?

Project Curacao is a massive Raspberry Pi/Arduino solar powered project first published in MagPi magazine.  It was first deployed in March 2014, lasted until a RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) incident in November 2014, came back to Washington for a refit and is now back in the Caribbean.

What did we fix?

We did three major things:

1) Replaced the solar power controller with the new SunAirPlus solar power controller.  We did this for two reasons.  We wanted to reduce the number of wires measuring currents and voltages for the Arduino Battery Watchdog.  The connector board has been a reliability problems from day one.  Since SunAirPlus has all of that built into the board, we got ride of three INA219 boards and replaced them with the built in INA3221 device.

 

 

 

 

2) We added two RFI Chokes to the long lines going from Project Curacao to the WeatherRack

weather instrument package (seen in the first picture above).  This was done to avoid another RFI incident such as happened in November 2014.   Basically, these chokes act as a low pass filter that will take out the higher frequencies picked up by the long line to the WeatherRack.

 

 

 

 

 

3) We installed a 3D printed Camera stand to replace the one destroyed on the previous return journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results

We will be publishing the first week of results in a few days.  Everything is working well, almost.  We are having a problem with the kitty litter cap camera shutter!