Raspberry Pi rules!
raspberry pi
Yay! Success! After a year.. or two.. the time and pi and motivation all came together in the space of under an hour last night.
Since 2002 we have had a weather station of some type (first a Radio Shack model, then an Oregon Scientific, and most recently a David Vantage Vue), data logging to a computer and sending it to The Weather Underground data repository. We have gone through many computers in that time and each one of them took anywhere from 60-100Watts of power, 24/365… a sizeable amount in this day and age of high energy costs. At 100 watts * 24 hours = 2.4kwh * $0.223/kwd= 53 cents/day = about $200/year.
Last week the latest hand-me-down computer died… arcs and melted power connections on the motherboard, not worth fixing or even replacing.
Last night I dug out the first Raspberry Pi Model B+ out of its box, hooked it into a display and keyboard, and installed the weewx package.
Another 30 minutes of tinkering with the configuration and then moving it into the same room as the weather station console, and connecting it,
and Presto! We were online again.
www.weewx.com supports many weather stations, supports uploads to major
websites, and also allows FTP upload to your own site (still working on that one).
(that is now working as well… look here for the page the weewx generates)
The best part is that it takes on the order of 2 Watts of power, not 40-100 (depending on what the computer was doing… updates, virus scans, etc).
Some of the software installation required a lot of manual installs of various python libraries, and that is what took most of the time to setup.
Now that we have proof positive that these little beggars can work, it is time to look forward to the next project… either the tinyastro one
or a simpler observatory surveillance camera system (or.. how do those mice get up there on top of the scope?)
From: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/model-b/
Raspberry Pi B has 512MB RAM@400MHz, 2GB microSD card running raspbian, 2 USB
ports, 100Mbps ethernet. From 2014 August! Broadcom BCM2835 chip, ARMv6 single core CPU, 700MHz processor speed, 3 watt power max draw,
Always a little more expensive in Canada, I got this from amazon.ca from
canakits. Close to $90 at the time.
QKits in Kingston has them in single or kit form, for less (Raspberry Pi 2 Model B $55).