Schlagwort: weather

IT’S SO HOT OVER HERE. WE’RE MELTING. SEND HELP.

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Reading Time: 5 minutes
[Today’s temperatures are set to reach a whopping 38ºC/101ºF degrees in the UK, and none of us know what to do with ourselves. This doesn’t happen here and we have nothing prepared: we live in a society devoid of air conditioning, and we’re are unable to comprehend weather conditions more friendly than a slight chill and drizzle.

I can’t handle it. I have desk fan, but it’s in a cupboard somewhere, covered in dust and sadness. My local corner shop is already out of ice pops and ice cube trays. And anyway, I believe the tarmac on the road outside my house has melted and will suck down anything that dares step or drive on it.

I think I’m melting too. I feel sloshy, and, while I’m not 100% sure this is scientifically possible, I believe I may be partly barbequed. If someone presented me at a restaurant, I would probably be described as medium rare.

So yes, it’s hot. Very hot. It only makes sense that we share a Raspberry Pi project that fits with this theme: here’s an article from the latest issue of The MagPi magazine, out today, that shows you how Ishmael Vargas built his own smart fan for his home in hot and humid Chicago.

It’s a very clever idea, and one we wish we’d thought up ourselves before today’s sudden heatwave/opening of the Hell Mouth.

Enjoy — Alex]

When you need to keep your home cool during the summer months, a smart window fan could be just the thing.

Summer days, and nights, can be uncomfortably hot and humid in the Chicago area. As the sun goes down, the outside temperature drops, but homes may remain hot. This is where a window fan comes in useful, blowing cooler air into the house. Last summer, Ishmael Vargas was using a small window fan upstairs and, after turning it on in the afternoon, he found he had to get up in the middle of the night to turn it off. “That is when I thought there must be a better way to control this fan,” he recalls, “and I started putting this project together.”

Viewable via VNC on a smartphone, the program window features temperature data and control buttons.

As he was already using a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor for another project, he opted to use that, connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Python program, to monitor the room temperature. This is then compared with the external temperature; if the latter is cooler, the window fan is turned on via a smart WiFi power plug (TP-Link HS100) — a much simpler method than wiring the fan up to a relay.

Weather report

To keep things simple, Ishmael opted to source the outdoor temperature from Weather.com (The Weather Channel) using the pywapi Python library, rather than wiring up an external sensor. “The temperature provided by Weather.com as compared to the temperature in my car could differ by one or two degrees. This is close enough for this project,” he explains. “In other parts of the world or rural areas where they do not have as many weather stations, an outdoor sensor might be required.”

A smart WiFi socket is used to turn the window fan on and off.

One issue he discovered was that in the early morning, the fan could end up blowing warm air into the house. “Depending on the size of the fan, the size of the room, and the house materials, the inside temperature might never be as cool as outside,” he says. “For example, if the temperature outside is 65 °F (18°C), the temperature inside might only drop to 67 °F (19.5°C) through the night. As the temperature outside starts to climb, you want to keep the fan off.” This resulted in him adding an ‘inhibit’ mode to turn the fan off at 6am.

Remote control

Rather than having the fan program run automatically on bootup, Ishmael opted to start and control it manually via an Android smartphone. The latter runs the VNC Viewer app, enabling remote access to Raspberry Pi’s desktop, on which there is a shortcut to start the fan application; this then displays a Pygame window with temperature information and control buttons.

The DHT22 sensor is connected to power, ground, and GPIO 4 pins on a Raspberry Pi Zero — a 10kΩ resistor is recommended.

“The fan application has two buttons to change the [desired temperature] set-point up or down,” reveals Ishmael. “Also, the button on the upper right is to close the application and return to the desktop.” His aim is to have more than one project running on his Raspberry Pi, and have a desktop shortcut for each application.

While the original project used a single fan, he has since modified it to add another. “I have been reading that two fans are required for best performance,” he says. “One to blow in and another to blow out.”

This certainly is a cool project, in more than one way. If you’d like to have a go at building a similar system, you can read Ishmael’s Hackster guide and check out his GitHub repo for the code.

You should read The MagPi magazine

The latest edition of The MagPi magazine is out today, packed full of Raspberry Pi goodness. If you’re new to The MagPi magazine, welcome! As with all publications produced by Raspberry Pi Press, today’s new issue is available as a free download on The MagPi website, as well as in physical form from your local newsagent, the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge, or the Raspberry Pi Press online store.

Subscribers to The MagPi magazine get discounts and free stuff, and anyone purchasing any of our publications with actual currency will help fund the production of the magazine as well as the charitable work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Website: LINK

25/07/2019
IT’S SO HOT OVER HERE. WE’RE MELTING. SEND HELP.

Facebook
Twitter

Reading Time: 5 minutes
[Today’s temperatures are set to reach a whopping 38ºC/101ºF degrees in the UK, and none of us know what to do with ourselves. This doesn’t happen here and we have nothing prepared: we live in a society devoid of air conditioning, and we’re are unable to comprehend weather conditions more friendly than a slight chill and drizzle.

I can’t handle it. I have desk fan, but it’s in a cupboard somewhere, covered in dust and sadness. My local corner shop is already out of ice pops and ice cube trays. And anyway, I believe the tarmac on the road outside my house has melted and will suck down anything that dares step or drive on it.

I think I’m melting too. I feel sloshy, and, while I’m not 100% sure this is scientifically possible, I believe I may be partly barbequed. If someone presented me at a restaurant, I would probably be described as medium rare.

So yes, it’s hot. Very hot. It only makes sense that we share a Raspberry Pi project that fits with this theme: here’s an article from the latest issue of The MagPi magazine, out today, that shows you how Ishmael Vargas built his own smart fan for his home in hot and humid Chicago.

It’s a very clever idea, and one we wish we’d thought up ourselves before today’s sudden heatwave/opening of the Hell Mouth.

Enjoy — Alex]

When you need to keep your home cool during the summer months, a smart window fan could be just the thing.

Summer days, and nights, can be uncomfortably hot and humid in the Chicago area. As the sun goes down, the outside temperature drops, but homes may remain hot. This is where a window fan comes in useful, blowing cooler air into the house. Last summer, Ishmael Vargas was using a small window fan upstairs and, after turning it on in the afternoon, he found he had to get up in the middle of the night to turn it off. “That is when I thought there must be a better way to control this fan,” he recalls, “and I started putting this project together.”

Viewable via VNC on a smartphone, the program window features temperature data and control buttons.

As he was already using a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor for another project, he opted to use that, connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Python program, to monitor the room temperature. This is then compared with the external temperature; if the latter is cooler, the window fan is turned on via a smart WiFi power plug (TP-Link HS100) — a much simpler method than wiring the fan up to a relay.

Weather report

To keep things simple, Ishmael opted to source the outdoor temperature from Weather.com (The Weather Channel) using the pywapi Python library, rather than wiring up an external sensor. “The temperature provided by Weather.com as compared to the temperature in my car could differ by one or two degrees. This is close enough for this project,” he explains. “In other parts of the world or rural areas where they do not have as many weather stations, an outdoor sensor might be required.”

A smart WiFi socket is used to turn the window fan on and off.

One issue he discovered was that in the early morning, the fan could end up blowing warm air into the house. “Depending on the size of the fan, the size of the room, and the house materials, the inside temperature might never be as cool as outside,” he says. “For example, if the temperature outside is 65 °F (18°C), the temperature inside might only drop to 67 °F (19.5°C) through the night. As the temperature outside starts to climb, you want to keep the fan off.” This resulted in him adding an ‘inhibit’ mode to turn the fan off at 6am.

Remote control

Rather than having the fan program run automatically on bootup, Ishmael opted to start and control it manually via an Android smartphone. The latter runs the VNC Viewer app, enabling remote access to Raspberry Pi’s desktop, on which there is a shortcut to start the fan application; this then displays a Pygame window with temperature information and control buttons.

The DHT22 sensor is connected to power, ground, and GPIO 4 pins on a Raspberry Pi Zero — a 10kΩ resistor is recommended.

“The fan application has two buttons to change the [desired temperature] set-point up or down,” reveals Ishmael. “Also, the button on the upper right is to close the application and return to the desktop.” His aim is to have more than one project running on his Raspberry Pi, and have a desktop shortcut for each application.

While the original project used a single fan, he has since modified it to add another. “I have been reading that two fans are required for best performance,” he says. “One to blow in and another to blow out.”

This certainly is a cool project, in more than one way. If you’d like to have a go at building a similar system, you can read Ishmael’s Hackster guide and check out his GitHub repo for the code.

You should read The MagPi magazine

The latest edition of The MagPi magazine is out today, packed full of Raspberry Pi goodness. If you’re new to The MagPi magazine, welcome! As with all publications produced by Raspberry Pi Press, today’s new issue is available as a free download on The MagPi website, as well as in physical form from your local newsagent, the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge, or the Raspberry Pi Press online store.

Subscribers to The MagPi magazine get discounts and free stuff, and anyone purchasing any of our publications with actual currency will help fund the production of the magazine as well as the charitable work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Website: LINK

25/07/2019
Prepare yourself for winter with the help of squirrels

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Reading Time: 3 minutes
This article from The MagPi issue 72 explores Carsten Dannat’s Squirrel Cafe project and his mission to predict winter weather conditions based on the eating habits of local squirrels. Get your copy of The MagPi in stores now, or download it as a free PDF here.

The Squirrel Cafe on Twitter

Squirrel chowed down on 5.0 nuts for 3.16 min at 12:53:18 CEST. An #IoT project to predict how cold it’ll be next winter. #ThingSpeak

Back in 2012, Carsten Dannat was at a science summit in London, during which a lecture inspired him to come up with a way of finding correlations between nature and climate. “Some people say it’s possible to predict changes in weather by looking at the way certain animals behave,” he tells us. “Perhaps you can predict how cold it’ll be next winter by analysing the eating habits of animals? Do animals eat more to get additional fat and excess weight to be prepared for the upcoming winter?” An interesting idea, and one that Germany-based Carsten was determined to investigate further.

“On returning home, I got the sudden inspiration to measure the nut consumption of squirrels at our squirrel feeder”, he says. Four years later and his first prototype of the The Squirrel Cafe was built, incorporating a first-generation Raspberry Pi.

A tough nut to crack

A switch in the feeder’s lid is triggered every time a squirrel opens it. To give visual feedback on how often the lid has been opened, a seven-segment LED display shows the number of openings per meal break. A USB webcam is also used to capture images of the squirrels, which are tweeted automatically, along with stats on the nuts eaten and time taken. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Carsten says that the squirrels are “focussed on nuts and are not showing interest at all in the electronics!”

The Squirrel Cafe on Twitter

Squirrel chowed down on 4.5 nuts for 6.60 min at 14:23:55 CEST. An #IoT project to predict how cold it’ll be next winter. #ThingSpeak

So, how do you know how many nuts have actually been eaten by the squirrels? Carsten explains that “the number of nuts eaten per visit is calculated by counting lid openings. This part of the source code had been reworked a couple of times to get adjusted to the squirrel’s behaviour while grabbing a nut out of the feeder. Not always has a nut been taken out of the feeder, even if the lid has been opened.” Carsten makes an assumption that if the lid hasn’t been opened for at least 90 seconds, the squirrel went away. “I’m planning to improve the current design by implementing a scale to weigh the nuts themselves to get a more accurate measurement of nut consumption,” he says.

Just nuts about the weather!

The big question, of course, is what does this all tell us about the weather? Well, this is a complicated area too, as Carsten illustrates: “There are a lot of factors to consider if you want to find a correlation between eating habits and the prediction of the upcoming winter weather. One of them is that I cannot differentiate between individual squirrels currently [in order to calculate overall nut consumption per squirrel].” He suggests that one way around this might be to weigh the individual squirrels in order to know exactly who is visiting the Cafe, with what he intriguingly calls “individual squirrel recognition” — a planned improvement for a future incarnation of The Squirrel Cafe. Fine-tuning of the system aside, Carsten’s forecast for the winter of 2017/18 was spot-on when he predicted, via Twitter, a very cold winter compared to the previous year. He was proven right, as Germany experienced its coldest winter since 2012. Go squirrels!

Follow The Squirrel Cafe

Track the eating habits of the squirrels through some utterly adorable photos on The Squirrel Cafe Twitter account, and learn more about the project on The Squirrel Cafe website.

Website: LINK

01/08/2018
Eight(ish) Raspberry Pi projects for the summer

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Reading Time: 4 minutes
The sun is actually shining here in Cambridge, and with it, summer-themed Raspberry Pi projects are sprouting like mushrooms across our UK-based community (even though mushrooms don’t like hot weather…). So we thought we’d gather some of our favourite Pi-powered projects perfect for the sun-drenched outdoors.

Air quality monitors and solar radiation

With the sun out in all its glory, we’re spending far more time outside than is usual for UK summer. To protect yourself and your adventurous loved ones, you might want to build a Raspberry Pi device to monitor solar radiation.

“Solar radiation is the radiation, or energy, we get from the sun.” explains project designer Uladzislau Bayouski. “Measurements for solar radiation are higher on clear, sunny day and usually low on cloudy days. When the sun is down, or there are heavy clouds blocking the sun, solar radiation is measured at zero.”

To measure more health-related environmental conditions, you could build this air quality monitor and keep an eye on local pollution.

Maker Oliver Crask describes the project:

Data is collected by the particulates sensor and is combined with readings of temperature, humidity, and air pressure. This data is then transferred to the cloud, where it is visualised on a dashboard.

If you’ve been building your own hackable weather station using our free guide, these are also great add-ons to integrate into that project.

Automatic pet and plant feeders

While we’re spending our days out in the sun, we need to ensure that our pets and plants are still getting all the attention they need.

This automatic chicken feeder by Instructables user Bertil Vandekerkhove uses a Raspberry Pi to remotely control the release of chicken feed. No more rushing to get home to feed your feathered friends!

And while we’re automating our homes, let us not forget the plants! iPlanty is an automated plant-watering system that will ensure your favourite plant babies get all the moisture they need while you’re away from your home or office.

Planty Project

An automated Plant watering solution that waters my plant every day at 8:30

Electromagnetic bike shed lock

If, like me, you live in constant fear that your beloved bike may be stolen, this electromagnetic bike shed lock is the solution you need.

The lock system allows for only one user per lock at any one time, meaning that your bike needs to be removed before anyone else can use their RFID card to access the shed.

Time-lapse cameras

With so much sunlight available, now is the perfect time to build a time-lapse camera for your garden or local beauty spot. Alex D’s Zero W time-lapse HAT allows for some glorious cinematic sliding that’s really impressed us.

Slider Test Sunset

Slider settings: -960 mm drive distance -400 steps -28 seconds interval Camera settings (Canon EOS 550D): – Magic Lantern auto ettr – max ISO 1600 – max Exposure 10 seconds

If you don’t think you can match Alex’s PCB milling skills, you can combine our free Raspberry Pi timelapse resource and Adafruit’s motorised camera slider for a similar project!

Infrared laser tag

While it’s sunny and warm, why not make this Raspberry Pi Zero W laser tag for the kids…

…and then lock them outside, and enjoy a Pimms and a sit-down in peace. We’re here for you, suffering summer holiday parents. We understand.

Self-weighing smart suitcase

“We’re all going on a summer holiday”, and pj_dc’s smart suitcase will not only help you track of your case’s location, it’ll also weigh your baggage.

Four 50kg load cells built into the base of the case allow for weight measurement of its contents, while a GPS breakout board and antenna let you track where it is.

Our free resources

While they’re not all summer-themed, our free Raspberry Pi, Code Club, and CoderDojo resources will keep you and your family occupied over the summer months whenever you’ve had a little too much of the great outdoors. From simple Scratch projects through to Python and digital making builds, we’ve got something for makers of all levels and tastes!

If you’re new to Raspberry Pi, begin with our Getting started guide. And if you’re looking for even more projects to try, our online community shares a sea of tutorials on Twitter every week.

Website: LINK

17/07/2018