A bright orange sailboat with solar panels on the wing sail and the hull of the craft. A number of protuberances from the wing are visible containing instruments and radio equipment.

Saildrones Searching The Sea For Clues To Hurricane Behavior

July 29, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 26 Comments

Hurricanes can cause widespread destruction, so early forecasting of their strength is important to protect people and their homes. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is using saildrones to get better data from inside these monster storms.

Rising ocean temperatures due to climate change are causing hurricanes to intensify more rapidly than in the past, although modeling these changes is still a difficult task. People on shore need to know if they’re in store for a tropical storm or a high strength hurricane to know what precautions to take. Evacuating an area is expensive and disruptive, so it’s understandable that people want to know if it’s necessary.

Starting with five units in 2021, the fleet has gradually increased in size to twelve last summer. These 23ft (7m), 33ft (10m), or 65ft (20m) long vessels are propelled by wing sails and power their radio and telemetry systems with a combination of solar and battery power. No fossil fueled vessel can match the up to 370 days at sea without refueling that these drones can achieve, and the ability to withstand hurricane winds and sea conditions allow scientists an up-close-and-personal look at a hurricane without risking human lives.

We’ve covered how the data gets from a saildrone to shore before, and if you want to know how robots learn to sail, there’s a Supercon talk for that.

Thanks to [CrLz] for the tip!

Raspberry Pi Weather Station Features Wireless Sensor Nodes

February 11, 2023 by Anool Mahidharia 3 Comments

Online weather services are great for providing generic area forecasts, but they don’t provide hyperlocal data specific to your location. [Harald Kreuzer] needed both and built a Raspberry Pi Weather Station that provides weather forecasts for the next 7 days as well as readings from local sensors. The project is completely open source and based on a Raspberry Pi base station which connects to ESP32 based sensor nodes and online services to nicely present the data on a 7″ touch screen display.

The architecture is quite straightforward. The ESP32 based sensor nodes publish their readings to an MQTT broker running on the Raspberry Pi. The Pi subscribes to these sensor node topics to pick up the relevant sensor data. This makes it easy to add additional sensor nodes in future. Weather forecast data is collected by connecting to the OpenWeatherMap API. All of the collected information is then displayed through an app built using the Kivy: open source Python app development framework. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Weather Station Features Wireless Sensor Nodes” →

Build Yourself A Weather-Reporting Diorama

March 12, 2022 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

These days, if you don’t fancy watching morning TV, you can always get an update on the day’s weather from your smartphone, computer, or any one of a series of other connected devices. However, if you’re looking for a more fun way to see what’s in store, this weather diorama from [Lewis] of DIY Machines might be just what you’re looking for.

The build uses an ESP32 as the brains of the project, responsible for querying the Internet for up-to-date weather information. This info is then displayed on a 2.9″ e-ink display, showing the temperature, chance of rain, and wind speed predicted for the local area. So far, so straightforward.

However, where it gets really creative is the use of laser-cut “scene discs” with different graphics on them to represent different weather conditions. They can alternatively be 3D printed,too. These are rotated via servos controlled by the ESP32, allowing the diorama to display a representative scene informed by the current forecast. If there’s snow coming, you’ll see a snow man, but if things are looking fine, you’re more likely to see a woman strolling with a dog.

It’s a fun way to learn about what Mother Nature has in store, and would look great on any breakfast bar to boot. We’ve seen some great builds from [Lewis] before, too, like this amazing seven-segment clock shelf.

Continue reading “Build Yourself A Weather-Reporting Diorama” →

How Does A Sail Drone Bring Home Hurricane Footage In Record Time?

October 5, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 11 Comments

It is unlikely that as a young lad [Richard Jenkins] would had have visions of sailing into the eye of a Category-4 hurricane. Yet that’s exactly what he’s done with the Explorer 1045, an uncrewed sailing vehicle built by his company, Saildrone. If that weren’t enough, footage from the vessel enduring greater than 120 MPH (almost 200 km/h) winds and 50 foot (15 M) waves was posted online the very next day, and you can see it below the break. We’re going to take a quick look at just two of the technologies that made this possible: Advanced sails and satellite communication. Both are visible on Explorer 1045’s sibling 1048 as seen below:

Saildrone Explorer 1048, a sibling of Explorer 1045, each one of five vessels equipped with a "hurricane wing" — Saildrone Explorer 1048, a sibling of Explorer 1045, each one of five vessels equipped with a “hurricane wing”

The most prominent feature of course is the lack of a traditional sail. You see, from 1999-2009, [Richard Jenkins] was focused on setting the land world speed record for a wind powered vehicle. He set that record at 126.1 mph by maturing existing sail wing technology. [Richard] did away with conventional rigging and added a boom with a control surface on it, much like the fuselage and empennage of a sailplane.

Instead of adjusting rigging, the control surface could be utilized to fly the wing into its optimal position while using very little energy. [Richard] has been able to apply this technology at his company, Saildrone. The 23 foot Explorer vessel and its big brothers are the result.

How is it that the world was treated to the view from inside the eye of a hurricane only a day after the video was recorded? If you look at the stern of the vessel, you can see a domed white cylinder. It is a satellite communication base station called the Thales VesseLINK. Thales is one of the partner companies that built the satellites for the Iridium NEXT fleet, which has 66 operational satellites in Low Earth Orbit. The Iridium Certus service uses its L-Band (1.6 GHz) signal to provide up to 352 kbps of upload speed and 704 kbps down. While not blazing fast, the service is available anywhere in the world and is reliable because it is not prone to rain fade and other weather based interference.

With just these two recent innovations, the Explorer 1045 was able to sail to the eye of a hurricane, record footage and gather data, and then ship it home just hours later. And we’re hardly exploring the tip of the iceberg. More than just sailboat based cameras, these scientific instruments are designed to survive some of the harshest environments on the planet for over a year at a time. They are a marvel of applied engineering, and we’re positive that there are some brilliant hacks hiding under that bright orange exterior.

If uncrewed sailing vessels float your boat, you might also enjoy this autonomous solar powered tugboat, or that time a submarine ran out of fuel and sailed home on bed sheets.

Continue reading “How Does A Sail Drone Bring Home Hurricane Footage In Record Time?” →

Reverse Engineering The Weather Channel’s Magic

March 14, 2021 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

For American readers of a certain age, Local on the 8s likely holds a special spot in your heart. The program, once a staple of The Weather Channel, would provide viewers with a text and eventually graphical depiction of their local forecast set to some of the greatest smooth jazz ever heard outside of an elevator. In the days before smartphones, or even regular Internet access for that matter, these broadcasts were a critical part of planning your day in the 1980s through to the early 2000s.

Up until recently the technical details behind these iconic weather reports were largely unknown, but thanks to the Herculean efforts of [techknight], the fascinating engineering that went into the WeatherSTAR 4000 machines that pumped out current conditions and Shakin’ The Shack from CATV distribution centers all over the US for decades is now being documented and preserved. The process of reversing the hardware and software has actually been going on for the last couple of years, but all those juicy details are now finally going to be available on the project’s Hackaday.IO page.

It all started around Christmas of 2018, when an eBay alert [techknight] had configured for the WeatherSTAR 4000 finally fired off. His offer was accepted, and soon he had the physical manifestation of Local on the 8s in his own hands. He’d reasoned that getting the Motorola MC68010 machine working would be like poking around in a retrocomputer, but it didn’t take long for him to realize he’d gotten himself into a much larger project than he could ever have imagined.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering The Weather Channel’s Magic” →

Desktop Weather Monitor Leaves Nothing To Chance

May 19, 2019 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

[Mirko Pavleski] has put together a little weather station for himself that combines Internet-sourced forecasts with physical sensor data to give him a complete view of his local conditions. There’s no shortage of weather applications for our smartphones and computers that will show us the current local conditions and the forecast for the next couple of days. It’s so easy to pull weather data from the various APIs out there that you even see the functionality “baked in” to different gadgets these days. Of course, you can dig through every weather API in the world and not find the temperature and humidity inside your office; for that, you need your own sensors.

[Mirko] took a somewhat unconventional approach by essentially building two totally separate weather devices and packing them into one enclosure, which gives the final device a rather unique look thanks to the contrasting display technologies used.

Local conditions are detected by an Arduino Nano connected to a BMP180 sensor and displayed on a Nokia 5110 LCD. The screen shows not only real-time temperature and barometric pressure, but the change in pressure over the last several hours. The three-day forecast, on the other hand, is provided by a NodeMCU ESP8266 development board connected to the increasingly ubiquitous 0.96 inch OLED.

If you’re not into the whole duality thing and would rather do it all on the same device, you might be interested in one of the ESP8266 weather monitors we’ve seen in the past.

Weather Forecasting Clock Makes An Almighty Racket

December 21, 2018 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

The old-fashioned alarm clock was a staple of cartoons in years past, with loud clanging bells and slap-to-shutoff functionality. Despite being an excellent dramatic device, these classic timepieces began to lose favor to the digital clock radio, and, in more recent times, the smartphone alarm. However, [LenkaDesign] has come up with this excellent build that combines the best of the old and the new.

The build starts with an old alarm clock. The clockwork internals are removed, but the bells remain, powered instead by a brushed DC motor. An Arduino Nano is the brains of the operation, interfacing with the now-ubiquitous temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors. Time is displayed on a Nokia 5110 LCD screen of the type popular a decade ago when options for small hobby project displays were significantly more limited then they are today.

As a nice touch, an old circuit board lends a new face to this clock, with a trio of big chunky buttons to act as controls. The LCD uses attractive icons to help convey information, making the most of the graphical capabilities available. There’s even a rudimentary weather forecasting algorithm that uses barometric pressure changes to predict the likelihood of rain.

Overall, it’s a tidy build that promises to serve as a great alarm clock, given the high volume of the original bells. Alarm clocks have always been a hacker staple, but if you’re still struggling to get out of bed this fire bell build should rattle your fillings loose on a daily basis. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

Continue reading “Weather Forecasting Clock Makes An Almighty Racket” →