For the latest in Project Curacao, a massive Raspberry Pi / Arduino project, check out Part 7.
What is Project Curacao?
Project Curacao is a sensor filled project designed to hang on a radio tower on the island nation of Curacao. Curacao is a desert island 12 degrees north of the equator in the Caribbean. It is a harsh environment with strong tropical sun, salt spray from the ocean and unremitting heat. But it is a beautiful place to visit and a real challenge to build and install a Raspberry Pi based environmental monitoring system.
Hourly updates are posted on the ProjectCuracao webpage on an hourly basis when the box is running. Thank you MiloCreek for hosting this page. Remember that the project will shut itself down on really cloudy days to preserve the battery.
Project Curacao is designed to monitor the local environment unattended for six months. It will operate on solar power cells during this time and will communicate with the designer via an iPad App called RasPiConnect. The charging and discharging peformance of the system will be monitored as well as the degradation of the solar cells measured. The system will be designed to reboot itself via a watchdog timer and will reboot itself when power is available in the case of a low power or sun condition.
System description
Project Curacao consists of four subsystems. A Raspberry Pi Model A is the brains and the overall controller. The Power Subsystem consists of LiPo batteries and charge management. The Environment Sensor Subsystem has in-box temperature, outside temperature, luminosity, barometric pressure and humidity sensors. The Raspberry Pi Camera Subsystem contains a Raspberry Pi Camera and a servo motor controlling the cap (made from a Kitty Litter Container!) over the camera to keep salt spray off the camera lens.