Project Curacao Is Up! Raspberry Pi/Arduino Project
As of June 6, 2015, Project Curacao has been reinstalled and is collecting data once again. You can check out the latest data from Project Curacao here. Thank you MiloCreek.com for hosting this page.
Here is the RasPiConnect control panel showing the PiCamera taking a picture of the Caribbean this morning. The camera is a bit skewed, but we aren’t going to take the box down and open it to fix the skew. We will work on it using software to straighten it.
What is Project Curacao?
Project Curacao is a solar powered sensor filled project designed to hang on a radio tower on the island nation of Curacao. Curacao is a desert island 12 degrees north of the equator in the Caribbean. It is a harsh environment with strong tropical sun, salt spray from the ocean and unremitting heat. But it is a beautiful place to visit and a real challenge to build and install a Raspberry Pi based environmental monitoring system.
Want to build your own Solar Power System? Check out the SunAir Solar Controller or SunAirPlus.
Project Curacao consists of four subsystems. A Raspberry Pi Model A is the brains and the overall controller. ThePower Subsystem consists of LiPo batteries and charge management. The Environment Sensor Subsystem has in-box temperature, outside temperature, luminosity, barometric pressure and humidity sensors. The Raspberry Pi Camera Subsystem contains a Raspberry Pi Camera and a servo motor controlling the cap (made from a Kitty Litter Container!) over the camera to keep salt spray off the camera lens.
Death of the Box in November 2014
Project Curacao quit back on November 23, 2014 during a ham radio contest that was barraging Project Curacao with RFI (Radio Frequency Interference). We expected from the data in late November that the front end of the Arduino processors was ruined by the RF interference during a late November 2014 Ham Radio Contest (not their fault – we should have put a choke on the long sensor lines headed to the WeatherRack weather sensors). Basically, the RFI caused the Arduino to reboot periodically during the
weekend before during another radio contest, but recovered. However during the next weekend, the Raspberry Pi SD Card was corrupted, probably by too many reboots because of the RF issues.
To prevent this from happening again, we installed two RF Chokes on the incoming lines. This will stop the vast majority of the high frequency RF from getting to the Box.
We also upgraded the solar power controller to a SunAirPlus. Data Data Data.