I’m still here but as is often the case I’m busy in the background. I’ve got a few projects on the go and many more stalled waiting for me to get back to them. Current projects are:
Creating a human detection sensor using 24GHz radar. This will be a small unit that I can put in a room which will detect active and passive human presence. Active presence means moving around in the room and passive means sitting down quietly, e.g. watching TV. The radar unit is an alternative to a PIR sensor which is good at detecting active human presence but fails at detecting humans that are sitting quietly in the room. Detecting passive humans is pretty clever. The millimetre wavelength radar can detect the smallest of movements, for example the slight movement of the chest as you breathe. This has little relevance to the weather though. It’s for my smart house installation. If I can get the radar working then I can stop using light switches and keep the lighting and heat on whilst someone is in the room (and it dark enough to need the light on and cool enough to need the heat on).
My quest to containerise my servers continues. I’m still new to this way of running things so each new server I migrate comes with it’s own new challenges. I’m currently working on the WxSim data server that processes GFS and ECMWF data into a form that WxSimate can download. I made some significant progress today by getting my scripts to download a set of GFS files and process them into the database. I’m happy that after a few weeks of banging my head against a metaphorical brick wall I think I’ve finally beaten my way through this wall. I’m sure there will be more walls in future though!
I’m starting to look at Ecowitt sensors to install alongside my Davis VP2 system to provide additional data at lower cost than a David solution. I’m getting closer to confirming my shopping list to get the greenhouse online with temperature, humidity, soil temperature and soil moisture. I need to do a bit more research into soil moisture first though. This area has a lot of clay so if I dig down 30cm I’m pretty sure to hit clay. Clay always seems damp and sticky so I’m not sure whether there’s any advantage in burying two sensors at different depths. If one is in the clay I suspect it will always be quite moist.
This is really the number 1 project for me at the moment. I’m getting married in July, so there’s quite a bit of planning going on with that. The weather relevance is that we want nice weather on both significant days (the ceremony in the middle of July and the party with family and friends at the end of July). I can’t influence the weather, but I can at least cross my fingers!
The radar sounds interesting, is there any possibility of it discriminating pets like cats?
We’ve just bought an EV, so home chargers and hacking the manufacturers API over 4G, and their ODBII commands are in the current projects apart from maintaining Cumulus.
As for soil moisture we have a different issue here in that we have about 12 to 18 inches of soil then its solid chalk!
I have really mundane tasks at present, setting up our new beach hut, the old one was over 20 years old and was suffering from exposure!
I can’t see myself getting an EV at present, too expensive and too short range at least for small ones, as we don’t have off-street parking for charging a hybrid is also not much use.
I suspect the radar will probably detect pets, but as we don’t have any I’ve no current way of testing that. We’ll be looking after my brother’s dog in the summer whilst they’re on holiday so maybe I’ll have a test subject then. I believe the radar settings can be tweaked quite a lot so maybe it will be possible to find settings that don’t trigger for animals but still trigger for humans.
EV - I’ve had a hybrid followed by a plug-in hybrid for my last two cars and I’d love an EV but I agree with Stuart that they’re too expensive at the moment. They’re simpler to build than ICE and hybrid cars but still cost 30-50% more. I assume the battery must be a big reason for the extra cost so I’m hoping that the new sodium batteries will bring prices down a little.
Beach huts - oddly for a seaside town there aren’t any in Blackpool. There are a few in Fleetwood and St Annes, but probably less than 30 for about 20 miles of coastline. So no seaside sitting for us, we just sit in the back garden. I work out there on my laptop when the weather is good (like today).
My main project in the last 12 months has been to build an observatory to house my telescope and other kit so I can take photos of the cosmos.
Photos like this:
Thanks Stuart,
I’ve stopped imaging for the Summer months, too much light in the sky up here between now and mid-August, but it give me time to get everything ready for the next season.
That’s another project I need to get moving with. I got a wedge for my telescope a couple of years ago and with moving house soon after it’s still sat in the box
I did that with my telescope & mount when I packed it away to move from the Western Isles in 2015 and only got them back out again during the first lockdown in 2020.
I’ve now got this little setup, all run off a laptop.
I’ve set up two ‘allsky’ cameras recently. One I have it installed at home (but the view is very limited) and the other runs at the company I work for. One of the toughest part was to get a new RPi4 at a normal price. In less than one month after setting the first one up, it recorded the Northern Lights which is a rare phenomenon at our 45° latitude.
Besides that, I need to learn Python better to routinely analyze the data I collect from various sensors around the house. I’m going through pandas, numpy, etc. and pulling my hair out to make good plots.
One of the things I thought to do was to mount a weather station/anemometer to my car. I wonder if anyone did it and how.
Regarding the high frequency radar: I’m not sure if there is any restriction on using high frequency sources in EU or specific countries?
Just this week there was a lecture given at our University by a professor who built its own weather radar using 2 high frequency sources. I couldn’t attend the lecture but I’ll try to get more material about it. The range is about 20 kilometers.
I’ve got a Celestron Evolution 8 HD with tracking and a wedge. I’ll be using a ZWO ASI178MC CMOS sensor. I had a Pi set up with control software but I think during the shortage I re-used it for another project so I’ll need to re-create that at some point. I’ve just been using a sturdy tripod mount but I’d like to put a pier mount in the garden. The tripod is probably more useful though because light pollution in a suburban environment, particularly during the Illuminations period, means that I really need to seek out some Dark Skies locations.
I’ve got most of the parts to make a couple of those, but stalled due to lack of RPis. Maybe I’ll get back to those later this year when, allegedly, supplies will become unconstrained.
Try asking in the forum. Python is one of the many dozens of languages I’ve used over the years and I suspect that there are others here that are fluent in it.
I’ve thought about that, well not the anemometer part. I thought that temperature and humidity would be interesting to log over a wider area. It’s a non-trivial project though because unlike our normal fixed location weather stations you’d need to create a web site that mapped the data geographically. That’s not impossible to do but as far as I know it’s not something that’s readily available so it would need some bespoke coding.
There usually is. If it’s in the ISM bands then there are likely to be all sorts of extra signals around that would mess with the radar and otherwise you’re into specific licensing which is likely to be time consuming and possibly costly. The sensor I’ve got has an output power of 10mW so it’s not going to have much range if used for weather radar!
I’ve now containerised the GFS component of the WxSim data processor and that seems to be working OK based on two runs so far.
Next step is to convert the ECMWF component which involves some more learning because the GFS component only uses Perl, but the ECMWF component uses both Perl and Python. I’ve not used a Python container before and I also need to change my code because everything runs inside a single virtual machine at the moment, but the future version will need to run on one Python container and one Perl container. I’ve looked at the code and it’s do-able but I need to change the way the code works to separate the different languages. At the moment Perl calls Python code and that’s not easy to achieve with two different containers.
That’s for tomorrow though. I need to rest my brain first!
A nice planetary imaging setup.
The Pi apparently works well with StellarMate software or ZWO now make the ASIAir Mini which does it all for you via a phone app.
You can get light pollution filters to help you with the illuminations but the best thing for deep sky in an urban environment is to go mono, which is the setup in the photo above. The filter band widths are so small that light pollution and the Moon light are filtered out. I use Ha, Sii & Oiii filters with a band width of 7nm, but you can get them down as low as 3nm. It just depends how deep your pockets are!
It was Stellarmate that I had set up on the Pi. I should still have the SD card for when I get a replacement Pi. I haven’t seen the ASiair devices before so they’re something I need to look at in more detail.
Stellarmate has a lot of functionality but (from memory) it was a kind of glue joining together a bunch of other apps so the interface wasn’t always consistent and I felt that I had to set up the same thing more than once. If ASiair has solved that problem then it would be an improvement. It also seems to have a set of 12v outputs which would be good to have, e.g. for dew heaters.
I hadn’t looked at filters. I was just starting off down the road of wanting to do deep space photography so I wanted to get the basics working first. I didn’t even get that done though. Maybe I should take advantage of this good weather to get everything out and remind myself of what I still need to do, but that’s just adding another project back onto my already busy list
I had an ASIAir Plus when they first came out and it was very good. It has USB & power sockets, target acquisition, plate solving (lines up your scope on your target within 50-100 pixels), dithering (changes the position of the target by a few pixels every set number of frames to cut out noise) and controls the mount, auto focuser, filter wheel and camera cooling, as well as a guide camera if you’re using one.
The ASIAir Plus is the full blown version, the only real difference between it and the Mini is that the Mini had four USB2 ports, where as the Plus has USB3, and no SD card slot.
The ASIAir wasn’t right for what I wanted but if you’re just getting into astrophotograhy then I’d highly recommend one, mainly for ease of use and setup.
