About the Project

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About the Project

Project Description

The K-12 WSN-DTN-WX project is a request that comes from Dr.Winfree and the local Flagstaff school districts. The goal is to have a functioning, weather station network that is capable of sending its data not only to the classroom immediately next door to the station, but to each and every weather station around town as well. It should be able to accomplish this via a delay-tolerant network built by the students in their classes.

  • Need to set a device up?
  • click here to download the User Manual

Video Description

Milestones

10/2019
Design Review 1 Completed		   11/2019
Design Review 2 Completed		   3/26/2020
Design Review 3 Completed		   4/13/2020
Hardware Completed		   5/7/2020
Final Documentation Submitted		  
  11/2019
Website Launched		   3/7/2020
Expansion Shield Printed and Tested		   4/13/2020
Weather proofing Completed		   4/20/2020
UGrads Presentation

Prior
Research

Signal Hardware

When originally designing the netwokring aspect, we had to look into which hardware we would use, we ended up looking into:

  • Zigbee Modules (more options)
    • and
  • LoRa Modules (better for distance)

We then determined we would go with zigbee due to its flecibility with mesh networks.

Sensors

From the beggining, we knew we wanted to use breakout board sensors in order to acheive the most amount of flexibility for the students in case they wanted to design their own sensors.

Testing

Sensors

When the first printed version of our board was completed we were able to test out the reading functionality of each sensor. Each sensor gave out a different type of reading but once compiled into a final program, they could be simplified into smaller bits of data for better processing.

Other Hardware

The Real-Time-Clock(RTC) and MicroSD card readers are implimented on the board but didnt function properly when tested. The RTC would become unstable once every few seconds and the MicroSD card reader simply was not detecting any card when they were inserted.

Problems

Where it all went wrong...

Issues we had

  • PCB Design Flaws
    • and
  • Zigbee Programming Failure
    • and
  • Arduino Memory issues

Issues we resolved

  • We resolved the PCB design issues by simply changing the layout of the shield.

  • In order to program the Zigbees, we found out the microcontroller has to be physically removed from the arduino assembly in order to allow the zigbee to connect to the computer.

  • Our current program runs the arduinos programming memory to 98%, when we first wrote the program it was 141% so we had to remove a lot of unnecessary code functionality in order for it to upload.