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How it evolved..

A project log for sound-based weather station

Converts weather into microphone-vibrations that DSP on a small computer can resolve into weather data

dave-merrettDave Merrett 03/26/2016 at 07:110 Comments

If you go back to the physics of sensing weather, its all about somehow converting the information available in things like wind, temperature etc into something the make sense to a computer. For wind speed, classical stations use spinning cups and a frequency counter. Wind speed is proportional to revolutions in a fixed time, direction is measured using magnets and/or coils that sense postion with a rotor and stator. Technology has recently ( in the last decade) moved to an active, but move expensive solution with no moving parts, usually involing ultrasonic pulses with temperature calibration. By using more computer power, time delays for generated sound pulses traversing between transmitter - receiver pairs can be used to estimate the wind-field.

My solution is really just an evolution of the idea that , with the right (simpler) hardware, computing (software) power can replace hardware complexity (power). In this case, its by making use of digital processing to interpret the effects of weather upon an object. Basically the proposed solution maps the direction and speed of wind into a frequency and amplitude domain, that is partly modulated by temperature.

Since we can assume a large computing power, the actual mapping is irrelevant, as long as is is stable over time, and the time / frequency / amplitude components are sufficiently measureable.

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