Project Description and Motivation:
Stemming off of the work of my mentor Jeremy Blum’s RainCloud Umbrella Minder, my teammates and I built an umbrella stand that lights up when an umbrella or sunglasses are needed for our Electronic Design Lab final project. The stand is connected to a custom built weather station that takes advantage of the real time data to inform the user when it is about to rain, currently raining, or sunny, so that they can remember to take their umbrella or sunglasses. In addition, the umbrella stAn added feature of the umbrella stand is the ability to determine whether the umbrella and sunglasses are present. Even if the user forgets their umbrella or sunglasses, they can be reminded by a text message.
A website displays the current weather data in an easy-to-read format. The server controls whether an alert is sent to the phone reminding them to take their forgotten sunglasses or umbrella.
Team and Roles:
We divided the roles amongst the three main components: the weather station, the server, and umbrella stand. I built the weather station, which consisted Seeeduino Stalker Board v3, 1200 mH LiPo battery, a solar cell (to recharge the battery), a DHT22 humidity sensor, a BMP180 pressure sensor, and a rain gauge all placed inside a plastic case. Additionally, for intrasystem communication, an XBee is set up on the Seeeduino board with a matching XBee on the Arduino shield on the Raspberry Pi inside the umbrella case. I soldered all the wires together, coded up all the Arduino code to be used by the sensors, and implemented a sleep monitoring system so that the system can save power. My other teammates handled 3-d printing the umbrella stand, placing the force sensors inside the case—connected to a raspberry pie under the bottom of the stand, and setting up a server, an online database, and a website for collecting and displaying the information .
Most Challenging Part of the Project:
There were a couple challenging parts to this project. The first was implementing a sleep monitoring system. Although the Stalkerboard v3 supports this feature, actually getting the code to work with the sensors was a hassle. It took few trials of incorporating several open source Arduino code (and the wikis) and playing around with the code to collect data every 5 minutes. And at night, every hour. The second was writing an algorithm to tell the umbrella stand when to light up. Reading blog posts helped give me an understanding of how and why it rains, but actually determining whether it was raining proved was difficult. Hence, a rain gauge was put in to solve this problem.
Moving Forward:
Future additions to this project may measure factors like wind speed and wind chill, which would contribute to recommendations for a jacket or a windbreaker.