Surveillance Sentinels: Recycletronics

Did you know that mountains are assigned to the most skilled sentinels? They look out in far, and report in silence using signals oblivious to anyone else except their clan. This is one of the most popular combat tactics' topic: intelligence. But fortunately, we are just waging a war against our own superiors who needs the job to be done. (Wink)

Also, snipers (who may reside in mountains) have additional senses: that humidity, temperature, wind speed and direction or even the earth's centrifugal force (Coriolis Force) is in the mind when aiming at a target.

Here's my picture of the mobile weather station for the MTE 2010:


I heavily improvised the structural part using scraps like telephones, bicycle chain, CD-ROM drives, radio parts, Norslan incandescent light bulbs thrown by my father (if you can't see a trace of it you really need a pair or glasses with the size of an aquarium-just joking guys), marker pens, CD platters, a good amount of screws, some epoxy glue and shafts from printers. This is also a concept in do-it-yourself (DIY) I'd like to promote: Recycletronics and as I coin the term, I'll be heavily featuring this concept through my artcles in the past (see my article on battery packs!!) , present (you're looking at it) and future. The complete structure will be unveiled in a final article on this prototype.

I admire both of the aforementioned concepts , therefore I will elaborate a bit more on weather surveillance:

Most weather stations are mostly mechanical in existence, therefore vulnerable to a lot of factors like extreme conditions and wear-and-tear effect. Also, electronic solid-state equivalents of such systems are very costly. Remember the mercury barometer and thermometer we used to have in secondary school? Scrap that, because solid-state electronics is making way!

The challenge is to reproduce this system with minimal resources for various applications like agriculture (farming precision: raindrop monitoring for precise use of additional water for crops, humidity regulation, etc), events’ planning (wind speed and direction for launching airborne systems, atmospheric hazmat conditions), early warning system (vortex and storm prediction), environmental studies (monitoring system for solar output, wind, and water quality, hazardous materials carried by wind) and so on. So basically the more access we gain over our surroundings, the better it is for ambient precision controls.

The techniques on solid-state wind speed and direction reading features latest improvisation using lower-cost resources with comparable sensitivity as opposed to the sonic technology featured in more advanced and costly designs.

Some details regarding structural characteristics and electronics are discovered and is a genuine implementation of some discoveries, which is true for the solid-state wind sensors, and the rest are mostly improvised, with a small amount of plug-ins to complete the design.

There'll be another article on how I built some of the sensors, so stay tuned with Vortex Electrica!

Regards,
Vizier87.