Cloud Sensor -- Field Deployment 1.0

Today was another visit to my in-laws for lunch, and we got the cloud sensor fully deployed for the first time! Check it out:

The enclosure is a plastic container, one of a set of 6 I got from London Drugs for $15. It's got clamps to keep the lid on tight, and a rubber gasket to keep water out. I cracked the lid of the first one I worked when I drilled a hole without proper support, but my father-in-law has a drill press (one of the many advantages of marrying well) and we were able to get a second container set up.

We drilled a hole in the top for the sensor can to poke through and sealed it with silicone. I thought that would hold it in place (ie, that it would act as a glue as well) but no dice. Instead, we placed the first container -- which is smaller and was designed to nest inside -- in there as well. It sat under the sensor and kept it in place. It took a little bit of arranging to route all the USB cables, but we got it sorted out in the end.

My father-in-law crafted a shelf for the container out of some cedar planking and some steel bits he had lying around. We screwed that to the patio, then the container to the shelf. Plug in the Raspberry Pi to a nearby outlet, and boom -- we had data!

...until yesterday at noon, that is; that's when the last update was posted. (I'm starting to regret not having set up an SSH tunnel back home.) I'm not sure at this point what happened, but overheating seems a reasonable guess. We made some holes on the bottom of the container for ventilation, but it's a concern. I think the Pi itself should be good for longer periods -- I had it running outside my house here for days in a row, just not inside the container. I'll have to power cycle it and see what happens.

On the data front, I realized a while back that the CSC is only updated twice a day...which means downloading every hour is overkill. The script still runs every few hours, but now it checks whether the newly-downloaded chart's checksum is the same as the previously-downloaded example; if it is, it throws it away. And I've got the analysis script set up to convert the colours of individual squares in the CSC into cloud coverage predictions. Next step is to figure out how to store this info so I can work on it. All in all, not a bad bit of progress.