Portable Weather Tracker

Inspiration

The PWT (Portable Weather Tracker) was born out of a group of outdoorsy students who love to go on adventures. We're all people that love to hike, mountain bike, and camp in nature. This spawned a wonderful idea in our minds, we set out to make the most lightweight and compact weather station so that we could go out and track our weather on the go.

What it does

The PWT takes in a variety of sensor data in order to display it on a dashboard, conveniently accessible dashboard, that you can see from your phone, or really any device you can connect to the integrated WiFi access point.

How we built it

We started off by going through the hardware needs, soldering sensors, assembling breadboards, and so much more. We used a lot of flux. Like, a lot lot LOT of flux. :) Then we went into the software side, where we tried to work with node, python, so many different things. In the end, we build a web server that runs on Flask, to serve data to a JavaScript frontend, where we display all our data.

Challenges we ran into

The first one was a problem with our Pi. The whole idea that we'd use an access point to be able to access a local web dashboard required WiFi, but halfway through wiring up our Pi 2, we realized it didn't have WiFi. Luckily we were able to message someone on Facebook Marketplace, and got the motorcyclist of our group to drive all the way out to Surrey to grab it. A lot of the other challenges we faced were related to software, aside from one pin we configured wrong. Writing the Flask API was easy enough, but then we ran into the issue of getting it to run on the Pi instead of our local development platform, funny enough, it was caused by a really embarrassing issue I won't admit on our front page, talk to me if you want to know ;) The next issue was with logging our sensor data, we struggled to format it, and finally, after all out hard work, we got something that output JSON in a format we were OK with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of our perseverance. Amidst the struggles of a fight in between us, and a bunch of sensor malfunctions, we pushed through to finish our project. This even shows in the fact that I'm writing this 45 minutes before submissions!

What we learned

We learned a lot about I2C, and particularly how to work with Raspberry Pi GPIO, something none of us had known much about before. We also learned how to make an API in Flask, and how to log to JSON files in python.