DIGA: A school project to build an IOT weather station

2017-06-02

Paul Schneider from the ecolea international school did an internship at the SBI and built a weather station together with researchers from our group.

During the past two weeks Paul Schneider, a pupil from the ecolea international school in Warnemünde, visited our group for an internship. Together with our team he was working on the DIGA project and built an autonomous weather station to monitor the air quality. DIGA stands for Data - Integration - Generation - Analysis. The weather station basically consists of a RaspberryPi and a bunch of sensors to measure temperature, humidity, and to analyse the composition of different gases in the air. Paul learnt to program in Python and he developed tool to monitor the concentration of different gases, such as CO, CO2, H2, alcohols (ethanol, butanol, etc), methan, smoke and so on. He needed to interpret analogue voltage values into ppm values and ultimately concentrations, which is everything but easy! He recorded several sensor values for a period of time and visualised the data, see for example the graph. He analysed the data, identified peaks and patterns, and correlated the graphs with events that happened during that period, such as a window/door that was opened, rain, smoking people, etc. The resulting weather station can now recommend to open the window in case of decreasing air quality, it can detect fire, or even predict the weather forecast. During his time at our department, Paul was supervised by Martin. In discussions with Ali and Andrea he learnt a lot about the university live-style and what it means to be a scientist. Holger showed him the world of artificial intelligence and with Markus he improved his presentation skills. Paul also learnt how to use Git, how to craft documents using Latex, and how to work on the Linux operating system.

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