In progress...some ideas sketched out...
Parameters to report
- Snow depth (now and historical)
- temperature in snow (to what depth?)
- Status of trails (groomed or not; open or not)
- air temperature
- Cloud
- Current precipitation
- Sunrise and sunset
- Moonrise and moon set
- date and time - GPS based (needed for coordination)
- windspeed and direction (now)
- pressure (now and trend)
- visibility
- humidity
- windchill (function of windspeed and temperature - i.e. calculated)
- dewpoint
- air quality health index
- uv factor
Sensors
- wind speed and direction
- uv
- air temp
- snow temp
- precipitation
- camera
- humidity
- precipitation
- visibility - scintillation?
Hardware
- Remote station
- Pi Zero - CPU, processor of telemetry etc.
- transmitter/receiver system
- power system
- sensors
- Mother station
- Raspberry Pi
- transmitter/receiver system to remote station(s)
- transmitter/receiver to digipeater (or it might be the digipeater)
- If it is the digipeater some form of automated system to format and put online telemetry
Software Programming
- likely in Python (open source) - programming expected to be a major part of this project
Resilience to Weather
- weather proofing will be an issue as the system is expected to function in cold and dark conditions...power management...durability
Scalability
- once first phase and prototype remote station and mother station set up, can set up additional remote stations at other checkpoints (about 4 more)
- some degree of coordination between the stations and mother station required - GPS timing?
Economy
- a major objective is to do this cheaper than the existing weather station VE8SKI set up by VE8WD (this is a project improving on his prototype design)
- a major goal would be to do this in a more cost-effective manner