What goes into a WeatherCube?
What's under the hood? In addition to thermometers and humidity sensors, WeatherCubes contain a power assembly, communications unit, and a brain (aka a microcontroller). The microcontroller turns on and off the sensors and the fan, acquires the data from the sensors, and broadcasts the data. Here's our first test of a thermometer and microcontroller from April:
We're still doing tests to compare our thermometers to a professional station.
The power assembly is composed of a charging board, solar panel and battery. So far, we have tested the solar panel to check if it's powerful enough (it is!). Here is our power assembly:
I added the general schematics for the weather-cube system to give you a better understanding of how it works. In the schematics you can see the role of each component. The WeatherCube is independently powered by the solar panel and sends temperature and humidity data every 10 minutes to the servers through Wifi or through a cell phone network. The WeatherCube is very precise because it uses aspirated temperature sensing with the help of a fan, rather than relying on a passive system.
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