You’re probably not going to hang out around Chernobyl any time soon. Still, knowing the conditions there can both satisfy your curiosity and provide scientific value. To that end, [Yury Ilyin] has spent the last couple decades installing homebrew weather stations across the Exclusion Zone for his own interest.Â
The remote weather stations that [Yury] builds all follow a similar design. Each runs on three 18650 lithium cells, charged via a small solar panel. Most of these cells were salvaged from old laptop battery packs. These cells are used to power a GPRS or WiFi communications module, along with a temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor, and a Geiger counter, because, well… it’s Chernobyl.
He has been lucky enough to keep costs down by finding an old generation GPRS SIM card that could be cloned and used across multiple devices, and thus far has had no trouble receiving signals from his many distributed stations. He’s been able to use his sensor network to track the gradual decline of radioactive emissions in the area from Cs-137, as well as keep an eye on the local weather conditions in an area few ever tread.
[Yury] has built over two dozen of these devices, and several have passed the test of time—with the lithium cells and cellular hardware surviving both high and freezing temperatures as well as the ravages of rain and time. He’s continued to refine the design over the years, starting out with an ATmega644 running the show, and later upgrading to STM32 microcontrollers.
We’ve explored distributed radiation sensor networks before, too, as well as many a remote weather station.
Thanks to [Luc Van Braekel] and [Paulo Ramos] for the tip!
The hack of the cell phone system is the real hero making this affordable :-P Although if not for that, having a master station with a cell modem collect data from the others via LoRa etc could work.
It could be interesting to put a lead sleeve around part of the Geiger counter and rotate it to make something like a Geiger radar…
Agreed. I’ve has so many projects that I wish could just piggyback off of my phone plan. They’d use mere kilobytes of my multi-GB plan.
I’m in the UK and was just looking for pay as you go sim cards for a sensor but nowhere here seems to do real pay as you go any more. Most of them are basically monthly subscriptions since you pay once and the data only lasts for a month regardless of how much you use.
Look into IoT SIM cards. You must watch your data consumption, though. Just opening a modern webpage once will drain your funds. I have only used ThingsMobile, works as intended.
Look out
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hXRa5eIlT4g&pp=ygUkaGlwcHkgZGlwcHkgd2VhdGhlcm1hbiBnZW9yZ2UgY2FybGlu
A Facebook link? Oh, come on…
I have a strong dislike for Facebook. But would you rather they link to a youtube video that doesn’t exist? It only makes sense to link to the source…
They could just skip stuff that only has facebook linkage.
Or at least skip the link, or maybe warn it’s a facebook link at least?