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@IanWatkins
Hi All,
My little Espruino project is to build a sensor pack to measure the lower boundary layer of the atmosphere (up to 1000ft AGL) with a multicopter.
Weather balloons, or "sondes" as we call them measure pressure, air temperature and humidity, and via GPS drift calcs, wind speed and direction up to around 70hPa (way high). These are great and is awesome info. to feed into weather numerical models to forecast the weather for the next five days or so. Downside? They are complex to do and cost around £200 per flight, unrecoverable and use our dwindling helium reserves.
What if you are small civil or military airfield who simply wants to know if fog tonight is likely, or expected low cloud clearance time? Yes, you could throw a sonde in the air (if you have the gear). Or a glider school needing an atmospheric profile to judge soaring possibility? Vertical atmosphere profile for 1000ft or so, equally valuable.
So I've taken a COTS hexacopter kit that is now flying. I've also built a "sonde" using pressure (BMP085), air temperature (MAX31855 ADC + K thermocouple) and relative humidity (Honeywell HIH-4030) sensors. Time and position of data is important so I've added a GPS sensor.
Once a second, all sensors are logged to a flight file on the SDcard for later download (Vaisala commercial sondes log every two seconds). The platform flies a vertical profile from ground to max height at a specific rate of climb. Once landed, the data can be downloaded, analysed and used for those questions about fog, low cloud, thermals etc.
The multicopter logs it's own flight data and from that I've found you can get fairly accurate wind direction and sensible wind speed from the IMU data. This needs trials.
This was a fun project for myself, being a weather geek, but my employer is so excited about it, it'll be in flight trials in July.
I would just like to thank everyone who has helped, especially Gordon.
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