Week 3 - Transfer Functions and a Fixed Design

This week, we made excellent progress with our weather station. Bolstered by our success with serial communication, we made use of a small WiFi router that Alex brought in to test if we could transmit data over WiFi. This was very successful, and thanks to Surya's previous experience with Arduinos and WiFi, we could implement and test this relatively quickly. Moving on from this, we also tried powering the Arduino and router with a portable battery bank, and again we were successful. This means that if necessary, the weather station can function as a remote unit, without the need to be physically connected to a PC, however our planned Java based PC GUI is still intended to be the main method of data display. We also tested our weather station outside and observed comparable readings to those delivered by the BBC and the MET Office. Because of this, we placed an order for the router and battery bank so that we could have one specifically for our project.

Surya and Herbert set about trying to rebuild our light sensor circuit, to see if we would have more success this week, whilst Anuraag continued to work on the GUI, trying to implement a graph to track readings over time. Katherine meanwhile worked to try and discover a function by which we could convert the current through our light sensor into a value of Lux. She managed to do this, and found that the function was:

 Lux = (10^5.25419954) x  (current^0.9852719925)

When we tested this formula, we read the same value of Lux that was reported by a Lux meter app on our phones. Satisfied that this formula worked, and that our circuit was correct, Alex and Katherine took our sensor circuit to have the light sensor soldered to it, and then afterwards once everything had once again been tested, neatened up the long wires on the bottom.
Surya and Herbert continued to modify the Arduino output so that it was in the correct format, and they added a special message to reconnect the sensors if the Arduino detected that non were present.

Alex and Katherine also began work on our Sustainability report, and with the help of the group noted down valid ideas and concerns regarding the sustainability and ethics of our project. This report will be completed during the week.

Lastly, Alex and Katherine modified our code that checked the BBC's weather data to produce the output in a dialogue box rather than in a command line, and also found a method by which we could modify this data to filter out values we do not need, such as visibility.