Hello Curbar AWS

Published May 23, 2022, 10:13 a.m. by tom

Thank you Curbar Weather. Hello Curbar AWS (Automatic Weather Station).

The new Curbar AWS installation has taken over weather reporting duties on curbargap.info. The replacement station is higher up (196m) and in a much more open place. During parallel test runs, wind readings were notably more consistent in both direction and speed, compared to the old Curbar Weather station, thanks to the smoother airflow away from buildings and large trees.

The instrumentation remains the same, but the whole station has been rebuilt from scratch. The old Arduino-based hardware has been ditched and replaced with the more modern Raspberry Pi Pico ARM-based chip.

It has taken around a year to recode the application and test everything ready for deployment. The new code takes advantage of many of the features of the Pico, including a proper real time clock and multi-core running.

The old 'Zigbee' communication system has been ditched and replaced with a LoRaWAN® (https://lora-alliance.org/about-lorawan/) system. This uses less power, meaning a smaller solar panel and battery. Lorawan is also a more sophisticated infrastructure that (hopefully) is here for years to come. It also makes it easier to incorporate other sensors into the network.

All the data from 'Curbar Weather' remains searchable in the records database. That system (in various places and with various different comms systems) has been running since October 2014. So thank you Curbar Weather. And here's to a happy future for Curbar AWS.