School sky light project
Many weather events are signalled by changes in sky brightness.When the sky darkens quickly, people know to take cover from impending rain. Today, it is easy to make cheap devices to measure sky brightness, and this website explains how a network of such devices could be built and networked by schoolchildren. This opens up many educational opportunities for students with a wide range of interests, and students would be motivated by hearing of their work in weather reports.
Apparatus
See also: introduction and results.
The measurements are made with a
http://www.robotshop.ca/dfrobot-ambient-light-sensor.html connected to an
http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/arduino-uno-r3-usb-microcontroller.html that transmits data to a desktop computer over a USB
interface. The microcontroller runs an Arduino script named
slave_logger.pde> and the logging computer interfaces to this with a C
program called msl.c, and that computer also creates the graphs shown on this
website at regular intervals, using the unix “cron” system.
Data
There is one sensor working at the moment, an image of which, along with a pair
that was sitting near it for a while, is at the bottom of this page. The data
are available in an sqlite3 file named skyview.db. Note that one is more
shaded than another, at the particular moment of the photo; the shading changes
through the hours of the day.
Development
This project is developed in the open on http://github.com/dankelley/school-sky-light.
