Raspberry Pi Weather Station for schools

When I first joined the Raspberry Pi Foundation, over a year ago now, one of my first assignments was to build a weather station around the Raspberry Pi. Thanks to our friends at Oracle (the large US database company), the Foundation received a grant not only to design and build a Raspberry Pi weather station for schools, but also to put together a whole education programme to go with it. Oracle were keen to support a programme where kids get the opportunity to partake in cross-curricular computing and science projects that cover everything from embedded IoT, through networking protocols and databases, to big data. The goals of the project was ambitious. Between us we wanted to create a weather experiment where schools could gather and access weather data from over 1000 weather stations from around the globe. To quote the original project proposal, students participating in the program will get the opportunity to:

  • Use a predefined Raspberry Pi hardware kit to build their own weather station and write application code that logs a range of weather data including wind speed, direction, temperature, pressure, and humidity;
  • Write applications to interrogate their weather station and record data in a cloud-hosted Oracle Application Express database;
  • Interrogate the database via SQL to enable macro level data analysis;
  • Develop a website on the Raspberry Pi to display local weather conditions that can be accessed by other participating schools; and
  • Access a Weather Station for Schools program website to see the geographical location of all weather stations in the program, locate the websites of other participating schools, interact with other participants about their experiences, blog, and get online technical support.

After a year of grafting on hardware prototypes and software development I’m pleased to announce that the final PCB design has been committed to manufacture and we are ready to start pre-registering schools who’d be interested in participating in the programme. We have 1000 weather station kits to give away for free so to find out how your school can be part of this read the rest of this post below, but first some background on the project.

If you’ve been on Twitter a lot you’ll have noticed me teasing this since about March last year. Below is a photo of the very first version.

I did a lot of testing to ensure that the components were reliable and wouldn’t become problematic on the software side after a long period of uptime. The goal was to have the Pi controlling everything, so that we could leverage learning opportunity: helping kids to learn about writing code to interface directly with the sensors, as well as displaying and analysing collected data. I settled on the following set of sensor measurements for the weather station:

  • Rainfall
  • Wind speed
  • Wind gust speed
  • Wind direction
  • Ambient temperature
  • Soil temperature
  • Barometric pressure
  • Relative humidity
  • Air Quality
  • Real Time Clock (for data logging purposes)

This seemed like a good enough spread of data. I’m sure some people will ask why not this measurement or why not that. It was important for us to keep the cost of the kit under control; although there is nothing to stop you from augmenting it further yourself.

Once that was nailed down I wrote a few lessons plans, and Lance and I trialled them with with two schools in Kent (Bonus Pastor Catholic College and Langley Park School for Boys).

BBC News School Report were on site and recorded a short feature about the day here.

We gave the kids one lesson from the scheme of work, showing them how to interface with the anemometer (wind speed sensor) in code. One thing that was clearly apparent was how engaged they were. Once their code was up and running, and was able to measure wind speed correctly, they had a lot of fun seeing who could get the fastest movement out of the sensor by blowing on it (current record is 32 kph, held by Clive “Lungs” Beale). Warning: there is a fainting risk if you let your kids do this too much!

We went away from this feeling we were very much on the right track, so we continued to design the scheme of work. In addition to developing schemes of work covering commissioning of the weather station and computing aspects we are working with partners to produce the learning resources that will cover understanding how weather systems work and interpreting patterns in the data.

The scheme has been broken down into three main phases of learning resources:

  1. Collection
    Here you’ll learn about interfacing with the sensors, understanding how they work and writing Python code to talk to them. You’ll finish off by recording the measurements in a MySQL database hosted on the Pi and deploying your weather station in an outdoor location in the grounds of your school.
  2. Display
    This will involve creating an Apache, PHP 5 and JavaScript website to display the measurements being collected by your weather station. You will have the opportunity to upload your measurements to the Oracle cloud database so that they can be used by other schools. Whether or not you choose to upload your data, you’ll still pull down measurements from other schools and use them to produce integrated weather maps.
  3. Interpretation of Weather
    Here you’ll learn how to discern patterns in weather data, analyse them and use them to inform predictions about future weather. This will be done for both local weather (using your own data) and national weather (using data from the Oracle cloud database online).

My next task was to take the breadboard prototype and create a PCB test version that we could use in a small trial of 20 or so units. I had not done any PCB design before this. So over the course of a couple of days I learnt how to use a free, open source, PCB design tool called KiCAD. I used a brilliant series of YouTube videos called Getting To Blinky by Contextual Electronics to get to grips with it.

Below is my second attempt. This board is what most hardware designers would call a sombrero. The Pi goes in upside down so it’s like a HAT that’s too big!

Weather Prototype KiCAD

I was aware that it was a huge waste of PCB real-estate. However, for the small volume run we were making, it was a convenient way to mount the board inside a cheap IP65 junction box that I wanted to use as the case. Below is the PCB prototype when first assembled. The little silk screen rain cloud graphic was borrowed from BBC Weather (thanks guys).

You’ll notice there are two boards. The small board marked AIR holds the pressure, humidity and air quality sensors. Since these must be exposed to the air they are at risk of atmospheric corrosion, especially in coastal environments. I wanted to avoid this risk to the Pi and the main board so this is why I split those sensors off to a separate smaller board. Below is how they look inside their respective cases.

The Pi sits inside the water-tight box on the left with M20 grommets to seal the cables going in and out. The AIR board on the right has conformal coating (a spray on protective layer), and is connected to the main board by a short length of cable. There are three large holes on the base of its case to allow the air in.

The weather station also needs a reliable network connection for remote monitoring, further code changes, to allow it to upload to Oracle, and to make sure that other computers on your school network can load its web pages.

Most importantly it also needs power. So instead of considering large batteries or solar panels I decided to kill two birds with one stone and use power over Ethernet. This allows power and network connectivity to be supplied through a single cable, reducing the number of cable grommets needed. You might be thinking that WiFi is an option for this; however, school WiFi networks are notoriously overloaded with many mobile devices competing for service.

So, if you go the same way as me, your school will need a long cable to run from the school building out to the location that you choose for the weather station. This basically means you never have to worry about its power or network connectivity. You are welcome to solve these challenges in your own way though, and this can actually be a very engaging and fun activity for the students to do themselves.

Once I had the PCB prototype working I had to get twenty more made and tested. This involved spending hours (it seemed longer) on the Farnell website building up a massive basket of electronic components. When the new boards and components were in my possession we took them down to a local company, EFS Manufacturing, in Cambridge for assembly.

Here are the twenty assembled and tested boards:

And here is another layer of the conformal coating spray going onto the AIR boards in the Pi Towers car park. It was a bit smelly and I didn’t want to gas out the office!

You’ll notice there are small bits of sticky tape on there. This is because the conformal coating needs to protect the solder joints on the board, but not block up the air holes on the sensors. This was a bit of a delicate job involving cutting the tape into tiny shapes, waiting for the coating to dry, and peeling it off using a scalpel.

So then it was just a matter of assembling the 20 kits with everything required to build a weather station. From the power bricks, rain gauges and wind vanes right down to grommets, screws and rubber washers. The trial participants were chosen by us to give us a coverage of field-trial users, schools and promotional partners. We kept one back to put on the roof of Pi Towers, and the rest were shipped at the end of November last year.

Slowly but surely reports have been coming in about these prototype kits being used in schools and code clubs.

Dan Aldred of Thirsk School & Sixth Form College has introduced Weather Wednesdays.

Matthew Manning, who runs the awesome YouTube channel RaspberryPiIVBeginners, made this video about setting his one up:

Andrew Mulholland, of Raspi-LTSP fame, has been using one at a Raspberry Jam where he volunteers in Northern Ireland.

James Robinson’s year 10 pupils from Soham Village College have been working through the scheme of work too.

OCR are putting one on their roof, and we’re still trying to acquire permission from the building owners at Pi Towers so we can put ours up on the roof. (Right now it’s operating from an outside window ledge.) Meanwhile, now that I was confident about it, I handed over the electrical schematic of the prototype to our engineering team. They imported it into the professional CAD package that the Raspberry Pi was designed in, and proceeded to make the Weather Board into an official HAT.

They have gone through it and essentially reworked everything to the same standard that you would expect from our products. So here it is, feast your eyes. You snap off the one side, and that is the equivalent of the small AIR board on the prototype.

Weather HAT labels

If you join our weather station scheme, this is what you will get, along with all the wind vanes, screws and other bits you’ll need. The plan is to mount the HAT onto the Pi using standard 11 mm stand-offs. Those will then mount onto a perspex sheet, and that sheet will screw into the electrical junction box. Nice and cheap.

The Raspberry Pi Weather Station kit is a great way to get your pupils involved in a wide range of computing activities whilst undertaking a practical science experiment. There is lots of opportunity for cross-curricular discussion on the science of meteorology, geography and global climate change. You will also get to participate in a global programme with other schools around the world. We have 1000 weather station units to give away to schools that sign up. The supporting educational resources are written in the English language and targeted at students aged around 15-16 years old; however we’re anticipating participation from pupils both younger and older than this. If your school would like to be one of this thousand then please sign up on THIS PAGE.

People we would like to thank:

In case you missed it above, here’s the School Sign Up again.

227 comments

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I’m not a school but would very much like a weather station! Hopefully these will be available to the rest of us at some point?

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Currently we just have the 1000 units that we aim to give away for free. More units may go on general sale depending on how much demand there is, we’ll have to wait and see on that I’m afraid.

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What an incredible bit of kit to get kids excited. Congratulations. I too think maybe you should consider making a commercial go at it. There are lots of people in the US who would love something like to use to report to Weather Underground. Having everything sourced, and ready to assemble would make it very easy.

Perhaps consider setting up something like a kickstarter and have it funding similar to the old One Laptop Per Child, where if someone donates enough for you to build and ship one to a school and cover all the component costs and shipping of a second unit, they get an unassembled kit or even just all the parts (meaning they have to do the soldering). So say each complete school kit costs you $120 and the raw parts to build one costs $75 (not including the pi) then you could let someone donate $200 and that would get another free unit available for a school and ships the donor the pieces they need to build one.

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David,

I am going to want to order at least one of these. I want one for me and if I can persuade the Computer Instructor at my Grand daughter’s school, I want to buy one for the school.

I may buy the school one even if the instructor does not want to do it and set up a class myself. I have taught Community College, how much harder can it be to teach Elementary School 8>).

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If the price is right I would like to buy one for me, one for my father, one for my father in law and one for my fathers summer cottage. There that is demand. Now take my money.

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i’ve wasted money on proprietary weather stations and still have no joy.
So you have 1 guaranteed sale in Australia

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Thats because the ones you bought are almost surely “Made in China”, these are made in the UK. There should be a worldwide ban on rubbish being imported from China. And don’t turn this into a race issue, its about jobs being lost in places like the UK and Australia, and our land fill sites being literally filled with cheap crap that shouldn’t be allowed into the country. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see why more and more people are jobless, put me in government and I will fix the jobless rate in 2 weeks.

This project being made part of a school curriculum is an extremely good move. Mobile phones, tablets and Computers in general should be banned from schools, however projects like this show me there is a tiny bit of proper education still being provided, but I cringe at the future of our children.

Well done to EVERYONE involved in the Rasberry Pi, its a brilliant piece of hardware, and its fantastic you are getting the kids involved.

I am another one for making this available for sale on the “Open Market”, we need far more properly built and priced products available for sale. I have quite literally spent hundreds of hours searching places like the UK and Germany for quality made products, I refuse to buy items made in China, and I highly suggest you do as well.

Don’t make my comments a race war, its got nothing to do with race, its about our own countries future, and the future of our planet.

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I was under the impression that Raspberry Pis were made in the UK exclusively now as well, but my I received my RPi2 and it says “Made in PRC” on the board. I am selling it on eBay just based on principle. I’d rather have no Raspberry Pi than one that was made in China. The whole charm of the Raspberry Pi for me was that it was manufactured in the UK.

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Where did you buy it? And who from?

Almost all Pis are manufactured by Sony in Wales. A small number are produced in China by element14, for sale in Asia and possibly America.

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I also have a commercial weather station. It communicates at 433 MHz. Using SDR (software defined radio) cheap DVB-T stick in Raspberry Pi I am able to receive all the information from the outside sensors. Just google rtl_433.

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I’m with everyone else on wanting one of these, or at least the instructions for making one and the list of parts. My wife and I could put one on our property for uploading to Weather Underground and be able to check the actual weather at our house. How cool is that!?

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What a great idea, Would love to participate in the future.

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Hello! I am a teacher from a school in Greece. Where can we apply to get on of these fantastic pieces you have created?

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What a fantastic application for a PI in respect of my particular interest — Radio Astronomy. Currently I am considering an Environment Monitor that would include an Magnetometer; Accelerometer; Lightning Incidence; And ….. as David said there are many other parameters that can be monitored – many using I2C connectivity.

If these become available to the wider community I and many others will be very interested and purchase.
Best wishes for success
Norman

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Count me in on the list of home based weather stations!

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This isn’t something that my kids school would have facilities to do but I would love to expose my kids to as a technology project and I know several others that would enjoy the same. This is definitely something that we would be willing to pay for in order to be able to do so. PLEASE SELL US YOUR WARES!!!! TAKE OUR MONEY :D

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Dear Sir,
This is an excellent project!!
I am a Science Teacher in a public school in Ierapetra Crete, Greece!Actually we are the southernmost school of Europe (Lyceum of Makry Gialos). Ierapetra along with Fado in Portugal have the least rainfalls in Europe and the most hours of sunshine per year in Europe. We are very interested in collecting and analysing the very particular weather data of our area and we would be very excited if we had the chance to participate to your project.

We have already participated in the hydrobots project (www.hydrobots.gr) where we constructed an ROV submarine that uses arduino sensors (ambient light, temperature, depth, pressure) to collect data from the sea waters next to our schoolyard. We believe that the weather station project will act complementary to hydrobot project and give us the opportunity to collect a complete series of scientific data concerning our ambient environment.

Looking forward to hearing from you
With kind regards

Michalis Orfanakis
Science Teacher
Lyceum of Makri Gialos

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I just finished compiling Gentoo on my RPi (took half a week) and was wondering what to do with it.

I was thinking of emerging Apache, PHP, and a few other goodies and turning it into a weather station accessible via any browser. I also want to add GPS/WWVB time capabilities to it as well. I have enough space (32GB SD Card, ~28GB available) to probably hold several years worth of data.

Of course, I want to monitor EVERYTHING, so I’ll probably be using both USB ports along with most of the GPIO pins.

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I am a student with the UMass Lowell’s Atmospheric Sciences program and would love to have one of these that we could compare to our current sensor suite and possibly replace it. I have included my email for contact and please do not hesitate if there are any further questions.

Thanks,
Kyle Sisco

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Hello,

I would like one of these too. Please add my name to the waiting/mailing/order list.

By the way, I though that school children in the UK
were called “Pupils”, but I often see the American use of
“Students” being used. I hope that is not the new standard
name…I prefer the UK not to use so many Americanisms.

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I want one also. I just bought a weather station from acurite because there was no raspberry pi kit available for a weather station. I don’t have the time now to engineer my own so I just bought one. I really dig the pi and have 4 deployed around my property (temp sensors, time lapse cameras and soon a monitor for my septic system…)

So if you decide to let them out to the public I would be interested! or at least the boards and code and we can build our own box.

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I am a storm spotter and I feel if this project could be expanded to encompass the SkyWarn spotter networks it might aid the entire weather process. Imagine having 100’s of these in a metro area and reporting to a central database you can look at what is happening with a bigger picture when a storm comes through.

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I remember a school weather station project run by the Americans years ago where they ended up with weather stations at schools on a very large number of islands that are American territory out in the Pacific. This greatly improved the USA’s Met office forecasters ability to predict the weather systems approaching the USA from the Pacific and thus improve their forecasts. Maybe our Met Office can use this data to improve local forecasts.
Anyway it is a really great project.

I agree with Paul that people other than Schools will probably like to build and install one of these and contribute to the cloud database.

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Very interesting, pity its a schools only project though, could see it as a modular project that would interest everyone!

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Like Paul, I need a weather station for my 1660sq.m greenhouse and this would be great.

Although I suppose I could possibly get the local primary school interested.

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i would love to see the boards on sale for the general public. If for some reason this can not be done, would you consider publishing the PCB schematics so we can get a chance to build the electronics on our own?

Cheers,
Christoph

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They will be after the schools run – watch this space!

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Cool. +1 for the schematics/pcb layout please.
Or indeed a full commercial kit….
Texy

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+1

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+10

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I too am not a School but would like one for myself and one for my RPi Group.

I hope all measuring is performed in metric ;-)

NT

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If every pi user has a weather station on their roof we could have our own weather app and we wouldn’t need to believe iPhone weather; which in my experience is always wrong!

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There are weather stations that can work either stand alone or connected to a laptop, see:
http://www.globalindustrial.ca/p/tools/test-measurement/meters-refractometers/complete-touch-pad-wireless-weather-station?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&gclid=COL8u93P18MCFWRk7AodMyMA3g
I guess instead of a PC one can connect the weather station directly to a 35$ Raspberry Pi without further hardware complications.

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This will cost a lot less than that. Plus the goal is not just to make a weather station but to leverage learning opportunities from having the kids write the code that makes it work as opposed to passively using an off the shelf product.

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I’m super excited about this weather station project. It offers so much learning for students, and already involvement from some great teachers on the scheme of work.

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Excellent project. It’s also interesting to see Oracle’s name getting dropped so soon after Microsoft’s: are all the Evil Empires suddenly queuing up to get invovled with the Pi? :o)

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Yup. They need to form an orderly queue…

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Oracle managed to join the queue before Microsoft did ;-)
http://www.raspberrypi.org/oracle-java-on-raspberry-pi/

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It’s great to see the progression of this project. Dave, I’m really impressed that this is your first project after learning PCB design. I was just working through some of the official KiCAD tutorials last night, but I’m going to switch over to Getting to Blinky. KiCAD runs like a dream on Raspberry Pi 2, by the way.

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Thanks for the shoutout for Getting To Blinky! That’s a great way to get started and it seems like it did the trick for your project!

If people have questions about KiCad, we started up a forum over at https://forum.kicad.info

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What’s the ballpark cost of the kit?

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They’re not on general sale I’m afraid. We’re giving 1000 of them away to schools for free. So you can only obtain one if you’re a school. However they may go on general sale if there is enough demand for it. We would hope to keep the cost of the kit, including a Pi, to around £100.

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“We would hope to keep the cost of the kit, including a Pi, to around £100.”

Touch Screen Wireless Weather Station with PC Connection (Price $185.00 = £122)
See:
http://www.frizzell.co.nz/weather-stations
http://www.frizzell.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/user-manual.pdf
http://www.frizzell.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/professional-weather-station-with-pc-connection-300×300.jpg

You can also install the Weather Station PC Software ( http://www.frizzell.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/Setup.exe ) to have an idea about what parameters you get organised in a database that you can further analyse in Excel, for example.

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Nice bit of kit, but have you missed the point about the schools writing their own software to run the sensors? Which I don’t think would be applicable to the Frizzell device.

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There’s no comparison. Top-of-my-head highlights of this project: education-driven; inter-school collaboration; centrally collated (big) data; links to the curriculum; lesson plans and resources; learning opportunities ranging from hardware hacking to programming to web development; cross-curricular links etc etc etc). Comparing this to some off the shelf weather station is like comparing Ted Simon’s ‘Jupiter’s Travels’ with ‘The Long Way Round’ ;)

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Its really not about the device but the learning it can enable. So many concepts and hands on experiences that the kids can access through this project.

Students can begin to see that stuff they’re learning is all connected, science, maths, geography and computing.

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We’re not trying to build the best weather station in the world, we’re trying to create a toolkit for people to learn with. For example we have lessons on how to write code to measure wind speed by timing interrupts coming from a GPIO pull up circuit connected to the anemometer. The kids get to understand every aspect of its operation. This is far superior to just using an off the shelf model, it’s not about the end product. It’s about the journey through learning.

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So what would the cheapest price be for just the board? (If it were to go on sale)

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We don’t know yet. Depends on demand – we’ll be updating this as soon as we can!

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Perhaps, once the schools have been served, you could run a kickstarter or other kind of crowdfunding campaign to get this off the ground for regular enthusiasts and/or folks who with children who are curious about technology and the weather ?
I know i would love to do a project like this with my daughter, as she already loves helping me tinker with my regular Pi projects, and she’s been asking me if we can’t replicate one of the bird feeder projects, or something with a weather cam/station.

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Count this as another vote to releasing the unit into the wild. I’d like two, if it ever comes to that.

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This is a great project and I especially like stressing the educational value of making a kit, rather than an assembled unit. When this is generally available, be sure to publish a detailed discussion of *all* the design and testing considerations, parts list, links to spec sheets, etc., so that the maximum hardware and software learning opportunity is provided. Students need to know what doesn’t work and why as well as what does work to prepare them for their own diverse construction projects.

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This is an excellent bit of kit and great opportunity for the kids to learn about real hands on science + computing.

We’ve spent 2 weeks doing some GPIO, interrupts, analog vs digital, circle theory, speed calculations, electrical resistance, lists and some coding too….

Congrats Dave on a superb project… now I just need to deploy mine :-D

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Congrats! This is a very good project!
I’m interested to buy or (better) to build a weather station like this one.
Can I hope you’ll give us all the details which allow us to build it by ourselves?

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Brilliant work Dave- was literally stalking this project on the internet yesterday as I’m in charge of our BBC school report project this year and I saw the video on the site.

Inspired to get my weather kit bits out now and wave them at the kids at school (not a euphamism) now to see if we can do at least some of the sensing with them

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Count me in when you consider selling this amazing package to the general public!

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This is exactly the sort of project that we’re pursuing within the Monterey Peninsula School District – hands-on learning through building, especially making mistakes (the best way to learn is getting (virtually) bopped on the noggin), it doesn’t do anything until you develop the software (and there’s a _LOT_ more than coding to be done – database design and communications experiments are just two non-coding activities), and we especially like the world-wide reach and scale of this, particularly the large database aspect (adults have no idea what The Cloud really is, so we need to teach the kids so they can teach the adults! :)

We’ve registered and hope we’re picked as one of the Lucky 1,000, where we’re at the business end of a 9,000-foot deep ocean canyon, stuck on a peninsula out right into the Kuroshio (Northern Pacific Ocean) current that provides highly-appreciated air conditioning even when it’s over 100 degrees F just 10 miles inland (which makes for some great microclimatology studies!). The U.S. Navy’s Fleet Numerical Oceanographic Center (FNOC) just happens to be located a few miles away at the Monterey airport, making for world-class field trips to meet with our professional counterparts who use massively-parallel supercomputers to develop meteorological and bathymetric models for predicting weather and SONAR conditions world-wide for civilian as well as U.S. and allied military forces. Quad-core Pi 2, meet multi-thousand-core computing juggernauts!

The U.S. Naval Postgraduate School is also just down the road, where some students master cutting-edge meteorological concepts and others develop software for the school’s own Dick Hamming Memorial massively-parallel supercomputer for pretty much every STEM-oriented project you could imagine, and many more you probably couldn’t. Dick was a protege of information theory pioneer Claude Shannon and Dick quantified signal/noise theory that allowed the long-distance analog phone systems to be developed for AT&T, BT, DT, etc., settling at NPS after retiring from a career at Bell Labs to teach in five different departments (now in four different schools within NPS – Mathematics, Physics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Operations Research), a feat that has never been matched since.

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Count me in as one of those who is not education connected, but very interested in a “kit” and possibly a more detailed write up (this one is really good, but segments such as the PoE hook up are a bit shallow).

Awesome content, and great endeavor – good luck to those who sign up to become one in a thousand!

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Another vote for an option to purchase a kit like this commercially. I’ve wired up a couple of sensors to my RPi, but would love to have a full set of sensors like this in one convenient package.

It would be cool to have a solar radiation sensor as well. It could be used to answer questions about the feasibility of installing solar panels in that particular location.

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Un très grand bravo à Dave & Picohorts!

Signed up for my son’s primary school where I help out teaching computing. “Raspberry Orange Weather” would be great from Martignan. Very exciting – hope we can join in.

Reckon I had better get my “translator” hat on as you mentioned the doc is all English. How you say “Anémomètre” en anglais…?

A bientôt, Alan.

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Do the schools have to be in the UK? Would this be open to US schools also?

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yes, this is a global project so schools in the US are eligible. Getting a good geographical spread will be one of the goals when selecting schools to participate, as will enthusiasm.

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Nice project and shows me where I might go next with my weathercam at HacDC.

For some reason the videos and the .png picture all show up fine on The Raspberry Pi with Epiphany, but none of the .jpg pictures.

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For thos of you interested in setting up a Raspberry PI Meteo Station, while you are waiting for this wonderful project to be available for all, here:
http://meteostrada.grechi.it/
you can see an implementation, and here:
you can find instruction (unfortunately, in italian) on how to set up an internet meteo station using raspberry pi and a PCE-FWS 20 meteo station (plus some open source software).
Just my two cent…

Pierluigi

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cool logo there dude

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+1 for general sale. I would love to get my hands on one of these!

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I wonder if there’s any part of this project that could overlap with the Air-Quality-Pi you blogged about before?
http://www.raspberrypi.org/airpi-the-next-step/

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It seems that’s a dead project based on the recent comments at https://www.tindie.com/products/tmhrtly/airpi-kit/#tab-product-reviews

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Code is still being updated (e.g. http://github.com/haydnw/airpi). I think the creator has run out of the current batch but is looking at making some more or perhaps a smaller version. So not dead, just not much public updating on progress behind the scenes.

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Ive been toying with the idea of having our ( somewhat rural ) community radio station do the very same thing! All we have to do now is connect the dots!

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Having been part of getting some air quality sensor units into the field, I’m surprised by the absence of one thing here: fine mesh in front of the bottom holes on the exposed-to-air box. Or maybe you don’t have nesting insects up your way? :)

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I think farmers might also be interested in this device. Is it protected against lightning? Does the soil temperature sensor also function as the ground rod? Does one need special isolation circuitry on the ethernet cable?

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Hi David,

I’m volunteering at our local elementary school as “nature-parent”( In Belgium, near Ghent)trying to involve and enlighten kids more with nature and everything around it.This Raspberry Pi application, would be great to teach them more about weatherconditions and showing them how these conditions can be measured,while trying to make them hungry for the technical side of it all. Can you tell me what the total cost is for the whole set (RPi+full set of sensors)for schools?
Thanks to everyone at RPi for their time and energy for engineering this little “wonder”. Keep up the good work.

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I run a group of 11-16 year olds for a local youth organisation and think this kit would be great for teaching, computing and the weather systems. can I apply for one of these kits??

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I just signed up my sons’ school for participation in the weather station program. Hope we make the cut. It would be a wonderful boost for our fledgling STEM program I am helping put together. Do you have any suggestions on other projects that we could do as well? I have demonstrated the RPi to the principal of the school and several teachers and they are in love with it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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For projects that require those cut out “masking tape” stickers. Have a look at the machines the crafting community use. They’re basically XY plotters with a scalpel blade rather than a pen. they can cut all sorts of materials down to really quite tiny pieces. Some even have scanners in them, you scan a drawing and it cut’s around the outlines.

Hours of fun.

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Very nice,

But as a safety issue why POE to external exposed location? shouldn’t there be electrical isolation for the boards and the ethernet power injector? (I’m thinking lightning strikes, and cables being eaten.) Or have you specified externally rated cabling?

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I’m worried about this too, even with an external-spec cable induced currents from a nearby strike in the long cable could blow the Pi at one end and the switch at the other. Surge protectors would be a good idea.

Other than that, great project and please make more than 1000!

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Currently sat with a group of upper key stage 2 children discussing using our raspberry pi’s. We are very interested in this project!

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Hi all, I just wanted to clarify that this is a global program and that we should be encouraging schools from outside the UK to sign up. If you were not sure because of this, please head over to the sign up link above now!

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Can schools apply to get a free weather station, if so we would like one please. I am from a school

Thanks

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how will the schools be chosen – I’m assuming that you will get more than 1000 schools interested in this!

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+ 1 for general sale.
Where can I preorder?
Should make it like a sponsorship, increase the price so that for each unit sold to private customers one unit should be subventioned for schools

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Hello,

I am a parent of 4 in a small private school in Altoona Pennsylvania. We have recently started a STEM program for our kids (grades k-5) where we introduce them to science and technology. Our first real program, besides some science demonstrations and design challenges, started with the Scratch programming language which really has seemed to sparked an interest. This program takes place in the evenings by volunteer teachers and interested students.

After looking at this program\ design, I feel that this would be a great next exercise for our kids.

Being an electrical engineer with some background in embedded systems this looks like something I could really help out with if our school decided to take this on.

What I would like to know is if there is a way that we can team together to make something happen for our school?

Sincerely,
Brian Farabaugh

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Absolutely – this is a global project. Please fill out the form (linked in the post above), and we’ll add you to the list for consideration!

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Great project for schools, well done. I am retired now but have been thinking of setting up such a weather for some time. Will be buying one of these when they become available.

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i am not a school and i seen that you have 1000 units. i would like to express interest in it for multiple purchases, when and if they become available for purchase. i am actually apart of a bigger network of trained weather chasers. this would be nice for beginners most def. thanks

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Could a scout group apply?

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Tinkerers impatient to make their own weather station should take a look at TinkerForge.com’s range of USB connected “Bricks” and “Bricklets”. They have support for Raspberry Pi along with Python bindings for the code. You can measure air pressure, humidity, temperature and light levels so not as comprehensive as the excellent education project this post is about but it’s trivial to add a bucket-type rain measurer and anemometer (available as spare parts from Maplin) so it’s not a bad range of measurements. I built one of these a couple of years ago – it’s pretty simple and Tinkerforge have plenty of Python examples.

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I’d been developing my own Weather Pi system with the prospect of launching it. Wasn’t aware of an official Pi project :-(

Did wonder why Maplin had suddenly sold out of the wind direction sensors.

Blog is a bit of date but the story so far
http://www.raspberrypaul.co.uk/category/weatherpi/

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Would Coding clubs be able to sign up from the free weather stations :)

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I would love one for personal play and use.

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Would love one of these sets for personal use!!!!!!

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i’m very very exciting with these kits but not a school now. Hope that could buy it later.

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Another note of support for a general release product, but not for home use: I have had considerable grief with a number of ‘professional’ weather stations in my day job because the quality of the software associated with them is far from professional, and in one case failed to transmit almost any of the data from the sensors to where it was supposed to go (despite the live feed being on, the recorded data apparently relied on something else which wasn’t working …).
So a weather station project which has proven hardware and a non-proprietary software interface (not requiring a full Windows PC to run the vendor’s software) would be very desirable for industrial development / experimental projects where a reliable record of local weather is required. The data quality probably doesn’t need to be stellar for many applications, provided it is reliable!

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Put me down for one when these hit retail.

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+1 for personal (non-school) user, would definitely be interested.

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Will the informational materials be available? This looks like a good project for makerspaces to use as a build your own guide.
Would give the project many more nodes for data collections.

I know I would like to build one myself.

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Where do I pledge/pay money? Besides myself, I have two schools in my immediate vicinity who can do with this weather station kit! I do not mind buying it and giving it to the schools, but the key thing here is availability! :-) Exciting stuff!

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Another +1 for public option to purchase. Huge weather geek & building a Pi-powereed weather station was going to be my next project. Thanks!

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Ehm, so the board is wired in to the LAN and uses PoE?
As far as I can see, you just created a very neat lightning rod into your LAN and switch.

Eek?

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These would make an excellent addition to any Amateur Radio operator who is into weather reporting. I’d certainly be interested, but obviously I don’t qualify as a school so I’ll just have to wait until further information on the commercial side of things…

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I’m not a school, but I so want one – please put them on general sale :)

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I printed out the article and took it to my daughters parents evening last night – the ICT teacher was very interested, and wants to talk to the Geography teacher about getting one!

Parents – let the teachers know – they may not have read it here yet.

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Oh yes!

That’s absolutely the best chance for us to dive into the world of computing :)

We are a small secondary school from Thessaloniki, Greece and we have just made our brand new creative space. Such a kit would be the ideal tool for introducing the Pi’s.

All our students are crossing their fingers.

All the best
Ioanna

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I’ve had an off the shelf station running on one of the original Rev 1 B’s since the PI came out but for the last 18 months I’ve been working on building one from scratch, using either readily available sensors like rain gauge, anenometer etc but recently I’ve started 3D Printing some components as well.

It’s been slow as other projects got in the way but a prototype recording cloud cover has been running outside since last April.

It’s a good project to get into – it’s just a pity I keep running out of time to complete it. Hopefully this year ;-)

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I wish to receive the weather station in Kenya. What do I do?

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Fill out the form linked from the post above! (You’ll need to be doing so on behalf of a school.)

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Care to share the sensors you used for that project?

As you already tested them out, it would be a time and money saver, as I had lots of trouble with various cheep Humidity sensors and anemometers.

Thanks!

PS. Although I love my daughter being only 2 and not wanting her to grow up older, projects like Raspberry Pi and this one here, making me look forward of her start going to school. Then I’ll be on the parents association and hopefully help out with the school coping up with technology, through projects like that…

PS2 excuse my bad English….

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+1 for public option to purchase. I attempted to build a Pi powered weather station using the Maplin anemometer and wind vane back in 2013 but got stumped when trying to get a value from the wind vane. Would love to get back to it and get it working with one of these boards!

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If it’s one of their units with a USB port on the base station, do a search for PYWWS. Dead simple to get running & has a good community behind it.

Peter

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My 2nd ‘commercial’ weather station is slowly dying, and I would like to replace it with something that I have complete control over — just like this! Please make it available to the general public, and soon :)

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Seems to me that this making this available to ‘the masses’ would be great, if there’s any concern about the demand, why not crowdfund it, more than happy for any profits to go back into the schools project.

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This is simply great. If i’d know school headmasters or teachers, i would right now call them to sign up for a rpi weather station.

Do you plan to make them available to the public? I also want one.

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I have read this blog with great interest. We have recently used Raspberry Pi’s as part of the programme we delivered to our Scouts (10-14 yrs) and also have one running a simple info board in the entrance way to our hut. This would be a great addition to the training and education we provide the scouts especially with the introduction of some new activity badges regarding the digital world and also the way we support teaching the weather again as part of the badges they can earn. Please publish details of the kit when it can be purchased.

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+1 for having this released to the public!

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I would also like to see this released to the public.

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I would buy at least two of these, one for my physics classes and one for myself!

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+1 for the general public release. I’d buy one for me and some for friends and relations too

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It was a semi-pain to setup.
I blame the multi tool Sam used.

Sam and I where the one who assembled the one in Northern Ireland:-)

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Would there be a way to buy the kit in Germany? I think this could be a good idea…

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If you’d like to be able to buy a RaspberryPi Weather Station as featured here raspberrypi.org/school-weather… Please RT #PiWeatherStation

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It is an excellent tool to use in a class project. Last we have made raspberry pi driven hydrobot. This year if we are lucky to get the kit we will make a weather station in addition to improving the hydrobot control through raspberry pi and scratch.
Check the corresponding video
http://youtu.be/BOvuG-Hsn2o?t=1m36s

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Nice move from all the contributors. I am sure it worths spreading the Pi tech along with meteo data analysis.

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+1 for general release — I’d buy two right away!

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Great idea!, great project!

I’m a Science Teacher at a secondary school in Madrid, Spain, and I’ve just applied for the project.
I hope we (my school) could get involved :-)

Thanks and congratulations!

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I’m not a school too, and how to buy some asap for agroecology and endangered species survey (research lab)!

Where can we buy some? When? Hope that you will have some release soon.
Best
sol

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I’ve just got my wife to fill out the form on behalf of the high school she teaches at, here in Brisbane, Australia. This is a fantastic idea that I would love to see available for public purchase – something that I am sure there is enough demand for! :)

(You can put me down for at least three kits – if you ever make it available!)

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Since school demand will certainly top 1000 units and this post shows a lot of private interest, is there a way to accommodate this in a realistic fashion?

1. Post the bill of materials. A breadboard would be fine instead of the custom PCB.
2. Post the custom code.
3. Post the lesson plans.

I don’t know how this fits with the projects’ vision, but it could help build a lot of momentum behind it.

Congratulations on bringing a great teaching opportunity to fruition!

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1. We intend to
2. We’re still working on it
3. We’ve been working on them for a few months

Keep an eye on the blog for updates.

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I will be watching for the ‘on sale to all’ too.

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We’re really pleased this seems to have struck a nerve!

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Another amazing opportunity, what a great time to be a kid….. or a big kid who teaches computing (chuckle)

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Yes, if they go on sale I would happily buy a couple for myself and my three boys schools.

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Hello,
I would be very interested in adding support for this weather station to weeWX (a opensource weather station logging software that runs great on a Pi).

Is there any expected date which you’ll release specs on it?

Thanks.

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+1 for having this released to the public for use in France!
Let’s break the borders…

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Add another name to the list of people who would love to buy this kit!

Great work!

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I would like to order one kit myself (as I can not solder one myself, I prefer a assembled kit!). Please put them on sale (think of long enough cables).

Thanks! Really love the Pi2.

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Amazing.. you could sell these.. and use funds to help sell more school kits this will go worldwide

I would love to buy one..

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Bravo!!!!!!

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Please sell these. along with any lesson plans so want to be back at school old people can learn as well.

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You have to commercialise this. Look at the interest above.

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When will you begin selecting schools to which you are giving away these weather stations? They are such an exciting and amazing project, I can’t wait to see it in action, I really think students would love to work on something like this and that it would be an incredible way to do something extremely concrete while learning extensive programming skills.

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One kit for me please !!!

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I applayed for one kit. I would like to build it with my class, i have built my own simpler project with arduino + dht22 + bmp085 + ethernet shield.

As i bought Pi2 (BTW: $55 not $35) i can us my old B in this project.

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As i’m a teacher at high school i broadcasted your project between my colegues in other high schools in Czestochowa (Poland).

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there in no doubt that you could sell many thousands of these , at the right price I am sure that most enthusiasts would jump at getting one.

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For schools a great project. Learning never stops so the commercialising of this for all ages is a no brainer given the interest here. Magnificent

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+1 for general public release.

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Looks a great project sure to get Schools engaged.

If these go on sale to the public would be very interested in tinkering with the kit. Just Purchased a Raspberry Pi 2 and looking forward putting it to use on a couple of projects.

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Ben — you say:

1. We intend to
2. We’re still working on it
3. We’ve been working on them for a few months

I say, posting now is better than waiting for “perfect.” Way too many cool starts end up dying because the designer wants to release perfect and never quite gets there.

This project is way-cool — an awesome learning opportunity — we can take your rough rocks and grind down some of the rough edges.

Jarret

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Having got a Pi set up to a Maplin wireless weather station and using Pywws to link them together, I can see this would be a fantastic project,me specially the challenge of writing the code to make it all work.

Hoping you end up going into production with this. An integrated weather community based on the same Raspberry Pi kit ought to have some value to the wider weather community. I’d buy if they launch to the wider community.

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Would you please post:

Parts list (with source info would be nice)
PDF of board trace.

I can etch my own boards if required and I’m no stranger to swinging a soldering iron. I have 24 farms (with multiple sites each) where this information would be very valued by the farmers involved.

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+1 for public release.

Definitely a great thing and I agree that the learning opportunities are brilliant.

However for my personal situation, I’d love one of these to augment some other planned projects! :)

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+1 for parts list and pdf of circuit board. Have been looking at buying Maplin and interfacing but would much prefer to build.
Can make board myself
thanks

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I wonder when (and how) will school get informed that they are a part of this project? Will this list be published on raspebrrypi www?

How many school signed up for this project by now, and what will be the key to chose one if more then thousand will sign up.

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We’re going to be looking for a good geographical spread, and prioritising the number of pupils reached.

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Good news, as we have over 800 students at school (200 in advenced IT class) there is hope we will get into program.

BTW: PI2 is cheap but not when you buy it with you own (not schools) money for whole class. That is why i use Uno R3 instead of PIs – 10 unos clones + breadboards + lcd + servos + sensord etc. costed me as low as 4-5 bare Pis. Pi’s are more powerfull and allow to make more advenced projects but ….

Maybe you could grab some info about creating some kind of whole European Union program that will spread Pi’s over Europe with EU funds support?

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Great project, i would like to have one of this so please consider selling the kit in the near future

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Would be nice if you could make the source code available.

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Should you have a miniature Stevenson Screen for the temp sensors?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen

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Hi David,
wow! I like the way how you were developing and manufacture with the student a smart Product. Is it possible to get a self-assembly kit for DIY?

Br.
Chris

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That’s really great idea – waiting for my daughter to grow up a little bit more. Hopefully by that time the station is going to be available to the general public.

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Shameless plug for my school to be included in the program: we have a large number of foreign students in the school, so given the mix of kids here we should be able to get translations of the instructions in a variety of languages. This could be a graded event so the quality should be high. As of today, we have 34 countries and 38 US states represented, and about 1/3 of the students are international students.

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What a great tool. I would love one both for educational and for personal! Will keep checking back. Any chances of further development? Ie additional sensor ability for AG possibility, Soil temp, PH etc?

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I’ve been inspired to finally get stage 1 of my school weather station online – currently using the Sheffield project as my inspiration – currently sitting in a plastic box poking out of the window in my classroom!

It’s sending data back to the met office but need longer cables to remove the effect of it being too close to a boiling hot radiator!

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I’m interesting in purchase this kit, can you please reply once you’ve release them.
Andrew

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This is a great idea! I would like to buy the kit as well. This would be a great project to do with my grandsons. Perhaps, you could come up with a pricing model to use with Kickstarteror or some distributor that would provide you with enough additional funding to be able to provide more kits to the schools you are targeting. In other words, let the private buyers fund the educational uses of the design. I would be happy to pay more to help a bunch of young people learning something that is both educational and fun! I bet it’s fun for the instructors as well.

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The hardware sounds great, I look forward to see the kit on general sale. I’m disappointed by the option to upload data to Oracle for sharing with only other schools. Have you heard of Wunderground? It’s a worldwide resource of weather stations, storing and presenting the data it collects from them, e.g. station IC*mbrid61 in Cambridge. (There are many stations clustered around Cambridge; that’s just one.)

Open data is just as important and useful as open software and hardware. I realise Oracle had a hand in the funding, something that might not be necessary today with the Foundation’s larger income, but perhaps the software provided to schools can also have the option of making data available to services like Wunderground, and pupils should know of Wunderground too so they can compare their results with other local stations to check for anomalies, e.g. colder due to being in a local dip. If nearly every school takes this up, we’d have a network of amateur stations covering the country and making the data open and publicly available.

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Moved to Northern Ireland, where we have a micro climate.I am living in a farming environment and looking at coding projects to monitor the ‘strange’ weather here. I have read the blog, asking about the PCB file and BOM or kit will be available? I hope to get the local young farmers involved. I am an Electronic Engineer and would see this as a great opportunity to get involved. I have 3 Raspberry Pi’s working in a cluster.

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It would be helpful to know the time schedule about receiving the hardware in schools. Is there any estimation on that?

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We homeschool our son. Although he does “officially” attend a school, their only role is to collect his grades for legal purposes. Is there any provision for us to be part of your weather program for schools?

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You can apply, but we’ve already got more than 1000 entries, and we will be prioritising schools which have a larger number of pupils, so we can reach as many kids as possible per unit. Please do apply; it might be that you live somewhere where we don’t have coverage, for example, and we are *also* looking for a good geographical spread – but I thought you should be aware of how we’re choosing schools.

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Liz, do you have and schedule when will schools get informed about qualification into program?

My students got very excited about your idea.

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Hi,

I’m from Charlottesville, Virginia (US) and am very interested in the weather station project. I heard about the project from the newsletter and contacted my daughter’s elementary school teachers. They were very interested but weren’t able to submit a request to be part of the 1,000 schools. A few days ago I registered for them. Hopefully it’s not too late.

Anyway, I was reading about the project from your website and am very excited about it. I’ve been a oracle dba for 15+ years and have also worked with Apex development. (Also, my master’s degree was in educational technology.) These would be AMAZING skills to start developing at an early age.

I wanted to let you know that I would love to help out (as a volunteer) if there’s anything I can do for this project. Helping with database support, as a reference/support to any schools in the US that need help, creating some oracle apex documentation/examples, etc.

Good luck,

Dave

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If you are able to supply just the board to a few schools in Ayrshire, I could supply sensors for a basic station for 3 or 4 stations from old Davis weather stations.

Interested in setting up a station network to feed into a crop management system.

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Can this use “Weather Display” as its software? To give website similar t o mine. http://www.ayrshireweather.org

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Congratulations on this fantastic project.
I am just starting to acquire some of the parts to construct my own weather station BUT your kit would form an awesome backbone to it.
Therefore, count me in for buying one for myself and I will also purchase one to donate to a local school here in Warwickshire if none are fortunate enough to get one in the handout.
I really hope you can get this off the ground as a commercial item and that any income from it can help spawn further learning projects for schools.

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It’s really pretty cool. where I can get this components?

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To me this is educational and you can only supply 1K units. Would it not be helpful to supply the BOM and Gerber file to build our own to promote weather education?

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I am from Greece and I am also interested in that concept and I would like one for me and definitely one for the company that I work for,which is a maritime company.I would also like to learn how it works and install one on a vessel.Imagine having mobile weather stations that send data from all over the world.Interested LIVE data that would be very useful for scientists and other parties,for educational and other business purposes.
If there is a list with a counter for orders apart from schools count me in.

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First of all congratulations on this fantastic idea. I have applied on behalf of my organisation. When are we going to be informed for our application?

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What a great idea! I’m working with middle school Science students on coding, one of the new “4 Rs!”, and this project would be a very useful addition. I hope we could involve and influence a large number of students, as the International School of Geneva is the largest International School, with over 4,300 students from all over the world.

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I am also interested in the commercial version of this kit.
My old weather station (wh1080)stopped working and I was looking to buy a new one.
I ‘ll buy at least 2 kits.

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As a teacher in Inverness I got the oportunity to go on a course called “Pi in the sky” run by the SCDI (Scottish Council for Development and Industry) and delivered through the Young engineers and science clubs Scotland. http://www.yecscotland.co.uk
Their weather station kit uses other components mainly from adafruit. As I am fairly new to python its not as straight forward as I hoped. This kit above looks great and I hope I will be one of those selected. I have worked out how to get remote desktop connection to talk to my PI’s and am now in the process of trying to get a python program to write CSV files. Once I can get my head around this and get something up on the school I might be able to get some of my pupils involved so they can repeat the process.

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I’m very much interested in learning Pi and weather station is an ideal opportunity to do so. I’m researching this subject for several months now and I was about to start from scratch. Your experience and guidance could help me and many others as I can see about the general interrest shown. I’m very much interested in buying a kit or at least more detailed information you are willing to share with all of us. Do you have any timeframe set when will you be able to release more info (eg. PCB scheme)? Something like wiki could be very nice and useful. Thank You! T.Valh

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Have you chosen the schools that will be sent the weather station Pi? How will we be informed?
Thanks in advance

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I am very impressed and after 73 years that is no small deal. I have my new pi. I am learning. I’m looking for my next “great leap forward”.

Thank you— each and everyone who has helped make this Pi thing so exciting. Your clear, well-presented information and help makes a huge difference.

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There are many of us who would like to purchase a board alone as we already have sensors, anemometers etc. Please can you supply boards alone when / if you make them commercially available.

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When signing up should I expect a confirmation email telling me that my details have been recorded ? Do you know when the project is likely to start ?
My school would love to be involved.

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Should the Foundation go on sending the packages to schools? The students are anxious already and the school year is passing by fast.

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I’m also curious about project start and involed school list.

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Looks like you will miss our advanced raspberry pi class – I was hoping this would all come about this spring. Any idea on when you plan to implement this? Not a biggie – we’ll just do an automatic soil monitor and hydration project, but we’d really like to be part of this. Please let me know where you are at with this….

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If these are released for sale I will buy one for my homeschool kids.

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Yes please!
Put me down for several!
Oh this is sooo different to when I was young and had to learn Fortran IID because the university had managed to acquire a disk drive for the IBM1620!!!

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Would love several of these for different merit badges: weather, electronics, programming, etc.

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I have singed up for this project some time ago for our school. Until now i have never got any feedback. Can you tel me if this means that we are rejected?

Thanks

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Where do I get on the waiting list for one of these?

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+1 for when these go on generic sale.

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Thank you very much for the project.
I am the founder of Elimu Living Lab in a rural but electrical powered Northern part of Tanzania (Sengerema-Mwanza). Elimu Open School is an education initiative of Elimu Living Lab that enrolls children with 7 to 14, 15 tO 24, and 25 to 35 years of age. The three groups learn differently in their activities. Around 52 percents of the students learn Agriculture and Animal husbandry, All parents of the rest of the group are farmers who always suffer from climatic changes. The intervention of this project may help the students and parents in these settings to acquire weather data to have help them in structuring for growing seasons while group of students will come to learn how these instruments works practically instead of gaining theoretical knowledge on weather station instruments. We are eager to get involved in this project as we found it working very powerful in our context

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You’ve created another monster. I’m in!!

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Hi,

I work for an air quality company. Your description for the air quality sensor leaves me with a few questions. What are you measuring, VOCs particulate etc…?

Very cool project.

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Kickstarter. Take my money now. If my kids’ school isn’t awarded one, take my money for two.

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I’d very much like to buy one too in the future. Currently I have one expensive Weather Station Davis Vantage Pro 2 connected to a Raspberry Pi using Wospi software. Unfortunately at the moment I have some problems with internet access and my web page is down for some time.

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Hello to all!!!

That is amazing!!!
Is there any link with mechanical / sensors parts are used for this project???

Thanks

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Dave, completely bowled over by this initiative to make IoT, cloud computing, coding & Raspberry Pi accessible & fun for our kids. Our school Gaelscoil Thulach na n-Óg in Dunboyne Ireland have applied & all fingers crossed we’ll be considered. As we’re an Irish speaking school we’d have the added Craic of working on this in Irish & bringing this dimension to the team.Here’s hoping :-)

Regards, Fiona Harte (parent)

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..how cool is this project and I just know the kids at our school would love to be involved including some of the parents of course:)…again too cool!!

Michael (Parent Gaelscoil Thulach na n-Óg)

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Yes Fiona/Michael this would be ideal for our school. Having already completed Hour of Code and Scratch projects I think this would be another great leap forward for the school. The children have a good grounding already, with many children taking part in CoderDojo after schools and at weekends, and with the support of our techie parents this would be ideal for us.
I have already registered our interest and hopefully we will be selected.

We are ready, willing and able!

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Hi,

I just registered for the project. I hope my school will be selected. Former neuroscientist, I teach biology to 14-16 year old kids. I do quite a bit of computer related activities and this is a great project.
I have another one that is to use raspberry pi as a data logger for practical activities (O2, CO2, muscular activity, cardiac rhythm, etc.). Maybe the next project of the foundation ?
thanks for all.
Philippe

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I love the idea of engaging the students into a project like this.
We started a robotics lab a couple of years ago so we realized that the kids just needs to get exited about building some cool stuff to get them ready to learn.
Currently we have around 600 kids at our school that would love to find more about weather stations and hands on atmospheric sciences.
Thanks for building such a nice project. We’d love to be part of it.

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Hi,

are there any updates on the selection of schools?

Cheerio,
Luis

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Check your mail. You should get information that Foundation will chose schools in June. A slight delay ;-) But in this school year there is no chance to start a project with students.

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Hi,
just got the mail announcing the results coming soon.

In the mean time 6th grades created a science club.
We are ready !

Thanks for such fantastics opportunities

Philippe

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What a great system, this would be excellent for our students to learn about the raspberry Pi and the weather. Is it still possible to order them and start monitoring the weather in Holland?

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Dave – are there any plans to make this commercially available? Many years ago I too thought of the idea of a weather station in schools across the UK with the data centrally collated and software to wean out the anomalous data from bad sensors etc in order to provide a really accurate crowd-sourced UK weather map. I had hope that providing many data points would help meteorologists get a better understanding of micro-climate changes.

I’d love to be part of this if these things become available. Great initiative!!!

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Hi!! My school General Lyceum of Makry Gialos of Ierapetra Crete has applied for one of the kits. We are looking forward for the selection results… Any idea when?? We are really interested thus if we are not selected we would like to buy one kit please.
With kind regards
Michalis

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I have two oregon scientific stations in two public schools and I’m using wview (on the raspberry pi).

I’m now looking to get news from this ofer so I can do the same in a third one.

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Count me in for a couple of kits, one for each of my grandchildren.

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We would love one to set up and use with our code club at school. Happy to buy one and would love to get our feeder primary schools involved too.

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I have been researching proprietary weather stations compatible with Australian communications regulations as most have wireless communications back to the base station. Many have radio frequencies which are not permitted. Wired tends to be on very old models so you do not get the newer sensor types and most are cheap Chinese components.
So should you decide to go public add me to the interested number. I would be interested in one for home and one for a RC model aero club field though it would need solar power and GSM radio.

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I would like to get one for use in STEM education with Boy Scouts. We would also be interested in building one as a project. Do you have the plans available? Thanks.

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I’ve been looking for a Weather Station kit for a while and this looks perfect. If you issue this as a kit I’d certainly buy one to build and operate with my family.

I learnt so much years ago when I was at school interfacing various sensors to the BBC Micro. It’s wonderful to see that the next generation will now have even better learning opportunities.

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hi there yeah only 1,000 weather stations more weather stations more lives can be saved

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Add me as another Australian that would love to buy a kit for private use!

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+1 for making to kit or just the HAT available for purchase please.

Keep up the great work.

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