Designing a Weather Station for Wireless Monitoring of Climate Information to Improve Crop Production in Cameroon

Undergraduate #48
Discipline: Computer Sciences and Information Management
Subcategory: Education

Shenick Alcine - Howard University

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Computer controlled weather stations are useful in the production of crops in developing countries such as Cameroon. It is essential to build a computer controlled weather station because it will increase the mapping of climate information to farming activities across Cameroon for overall crop production. The purpose of this project was to design a weather station using low cost devices that are feasible for an underdeveloped country like Cameroon. The weather station will mainly consist of three parts namely, atmospheric sensors; controller and photovoltaic cells. The atmospheric sensors sub-system is made of an anemometer, a rain gauge, wind direction, a temperature-humidity sensor and a barometric pressure sensor. The controller sub-system is used to process, record and broadcast data read by the sensors using a WIFI technology. The WIFI technology uses an arduino board that is an open-source hardware and software project. The photovoltaic sub-system is used to power the entire weather station. We compared existing full automatic weather stations with the same features to our design. The results showed a significantly cheaper design with accurate results. These results proposed allows Cameroon to have their own weather station and database that they can use in order to increase crop production. The advantage of full automatic weather stations would have to be their capabilities to forecast the weather day’s, weeks, and sometimes months ahead. However, full automatic weather stations lack the accuracy of what the weather is today. That being so, implications can be made by comparing the present data from our newly designed weather station with the past data of a full automatic weather stations in order to determine patterns.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): Gear UP/National Science Foundation

Faculty Advisor: Wayne Patterson, wpatterson@scs.howard.edu

Role: I proposed comparing the present data from our newly developed low cost weather station with a full automatic weather station. I also proposed and developed a portable weather station that would be more useful to farmers rather then a remote weather station.