Project Curacao3 is Live – Raspberry Pi 3B+ Based Weather Station
Project Curacao3 is a Raspberry Pi based environmental monitoring system located on the island of Curacao in the Caribbean. It consists of a modified SwitchDoc Labs SkyWeather system with a solar power system based on the SwitchDoc Labs SolarMAX Lead Acid.
Project Curacao3 has now been installed. It was installed in early December 2019 and is planned to run until at least mid June of 2020 with no intervention. In June 2020 we intend to do a visual inspection of the unit and the addition of a redundant power supply.
Sunset on Curacao
February 2020 Project Curacao 3is Up Again
Project Curacao was down from December 28, 2019 to February 2, 2020 due to a loose connection. Fixed! It’s up again! Loose connection between the Solar Power System and the Raspberry Pi SkyWeather system. The SolarMAX system was up the whole time!
The December 2019 Failure
Note: As of December 28th, 2019, we have experienced a power outage on Project Curacao3. We noticed that it went down during a
very windy day and we strongly suspect that a wire has come loose inside the Solar Power box. We noticed an issue when we were down there and thought we had fixed it! Part of the rational is that the system abruptly turned off during a period of good solar power with a well charged battery. If it had been the charging system, the battery would have kept the machine alive. However, a disconnected battery, even with sun, will take the system down immediately, which is what we think happened. Unfortunately, we will not have a technical visitor at the Curacao site until the end of January. We will also have install a redundant power supply. 🙂 A picture of the moment of death is to the left. 0400 pacific time is 0800 Curacao time. Due to our excellent reliability data of the Raspberry Pi based system, all of this data seems to fit this loose connection hypothesis.
You can see the latest Project Curacao3 picture here:
Current Project Curacao3 SnapShot
Accessing Project Curacao3
You can see the latest Project Curacao3 picture here:
Current Project Curacao3 SnapShot
And the current conditions at the station here:
https://skyweather.weatherstem.com/curacao
Click on Video above the all sensor block to see the last 7 timelapses. Very cool.
History
Project Curacao (March 2014 – February 2016)
The first Project Curacao (Project Curacao 1) was deployed on March 7, 2014 and lasted until early 2016 (what finally killed the box was a loose wire from the Raspberry Pi solar panels. We could see what the problem is from our graphs and charts coming in from 3500 miles away. It had been connecting and disconnecting for a few months and finally went completely). It was kind of bizarre watching the box slowly degrade as the battery charges went down. Like looking at the Mars Rover slowly die. By the time we got someone to look at the box (in September 2016), the batteries were toasted.
The overall Project Curacao 1 architecture had two computers (an Arduino Mega 2560 and a Raspberry Pi A) working together. The Arduino managed the power supply for the system. It switched the Raspberry Pi on and off at certain times and power levels, and gathered weather data during the night. It also switched from solar to the wind power system on at night. The wind power system didn’t last long. The tropics are a relentless environment, especially next to the ocean.
We decided rather than repairing the Project Curacao box, we would build a new Project Curacao box using the new technology and systems we had developed since 2013. And with that Project Curacao2 was born.
Project Curacao2 (June 2017 – March 2019)
Below is a comparison shot of the original Project Curacao box (on the left) with the new Project Curacao2 box on the right. You can see from this picture the advances we have made in three years. The new Project Curacao2 box is wired together almost entirely using Grove Connectors. We have also designed and integrated new solar power controllers, wiring schemes and, in a big design decision, removed the Arduino Battery WatchDog. We found the reliability of our new solar power control scheme and power reduction techniques made the single computer Project Curacao2 possible.
Project Curacao2 Dies a Slow Death
On October 5th of 2018, Project Curacao2 quit charging the batteries from the Solar Panel system and then said goodbye. How did it say goodbye? By sending an email (shown below). Project Curacao2 had been down and operating solo down in the Caribbean for over 3 months and was behaving very well.
It emailed Dr. Shovic about 2:55am with this sad news. This is a normal thing to for the Raspberry Pi to do if the Pi figures it can’t make it on the battery powered and so it emails us that it is shutting down. However, in this case it never booted up in the morning when the sun came up again and started the batteries.
This was the last picture (from the night before) that it emailed Dr. Shovic. When this picture was taken the solar panels were still putting out power normally, although at this time of night it wasn’t much power , only 29mA coming from the panels, while we were pulling 437mA out of the battery (BV=3.61V/BC=437.20mA/SV=4.58V/SC=29.60mA/sun). Almost time for the Pi to shut itself down and go to sleep (3.5V is the night night voltage on the battery).
We revived the station with a repair trip in November and it lasted until March 2019 when we had it taken down and shipped back to the labs for analysis and preparation for Project Curacao3.
Project Curacao3 (December 2019 – Present)
We decided to build a new Project Curacao3 box utilizing our new technology developed for the SkyWeather product line and our new SolarMAX technology. This allowed us to build a much more powerful (100W) solar panel system with a long lasting Lead Acid battery charge based on SolarMAX Lead Acid. We upgraded SkyWeather to a more powerful Raspberry Pi 3B+ (which we could support with our new Solar Power system) and added a fan to the SkyWeather system. Below you can see Project Curacao2 on the left compared to Project Curacao3.
Project Curacao3
Project Curacao3 is based on the SwitchDoc Labs SkyWeather Kit. Two major modifications were made to the hardware. First of all, we added a fan for the tropics under SkyWeather computer control and then the second modification was to add SolarMAX Lead Acid as the 100W Solar Panel power system for Project Curacao3.
SkyWeather designed to be the hub to which you connect everything to turn your Raspberry Pi into a complete Weather Station that talks to the Cloud. Just ready to be customized to your project and usage. It is designed to be a great way of learning to hook up hardware to the Raspberry Pi. And you have all the source code to modify to work the way you want it to do.
The controller in the system is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ single board computer. Other versions of the Raspberry Pi (Zero W, A+, Raspberry Pi 4) can be used, but we decided that we wanted a 3B+ to provide more computer power for future software for Project Curacao3 (believe it or not we want to add a machine learning system to spot cruise ships in the photographs).
Block Diagram
Solar Power System
Learn to select your own Solar Power System with this new Tutorial.
SolarMAX
SolarMAX Lead Acid is a SwitchDoc Labs designed system to charge batteries from Large Solar panels in order to provide more power
to small computer systems. SolarMAX is designed to collect and return data about the solar panel system to the powered (or even other computers) computer via a LoRa link. SolarMAX collects and transmits the following data via 433MHz LoRa Radio every 30 seconds. No data cable needed! It transmits:
- Battery Voltage
- Battery Current
- Solar Panel Voltage
- Solar Panel Current
- Load Voltage
- Load Current
It also supplies the following about inside the SolarMAX box:
- Inbox Temperature
- Inbox Humidity
SolarMAX uses a 433MHz LoRa module which can transmit up to 2 kilometers or further with larger antennas and uses very little power. You plug the included LoRa receiver into a Raspberry Pi or Arduino and read the data on the computer with the provided software drivers for the Pi, Arduino, ESP8266 and the ESP32.
Sensor System
Project Curacao3 has the following sensors:
- Barometric Pressure
- LIGHTNING!
- Outside Temperature
- Outside Humidity
- Altitude
- Inside Temperature (in box)
- Inside Humidity (in box)
- Air Quality – AQI (your own local Air Quality Sensor)
- Sunlight
- Wind Speed
- Wind Direction
- Rain
This project, being open source, is expandable – there are hundreds of Grove modules available
Software Description
The software for Project Curacao3 is basically SkyWeather with a different configuration file. The software consists of a series of Python2 modules mostly run on a pure python scheduling system, APscheduler. All of the software is open source and can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/switchdoclabs/SDL_Pi_SkyWeather
Parts List
Main Kits:
Weatherization Parts (listed in the manuals):
WeatherSTEM
That’s right. Your weather station and sky pictures will be visible to everyone on the Internet and you will be sharing your local weather with locations all over the globe!
WeatherSTEM is an innovative cloud-based weather education platform for people of all ages and professions. Our innovative curriculum is designed to help you and your students understand the myriad ways weather impacts just about everything in our lives. SkyWeather is a great way to become part of the WeatherSTEM community.
Note to Educators: WeatherSTEM has a full set of experiments and curriculum for your class to use SkyWeather and WeatherSTEM in the classroom
A very interesting Project and very well written that I would like to duplicate.
Well done,indeed!
Regarding the Battery problem perhaps this ma well help — the restart function would be of interest
Your Link doesn’t work unfortunately.
If you are referring to startup/shutdown, SolarMAX handles the startup and shutdown hysteresis. Turn for on SolarMAX Lead Acid, 12.8V OR Solar Panel Current > 100mA) and shutdown for SolarMAX Lead Acid, ~11.0V – Raspberry Pi reads this and performs a shutdown via software. It is great to have all the solar data available to the Pi!
SDL