In this episode, we’re talking to Dr. John Shovic from SwitchDoc Labs. John is the Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of SwitchDoc Labs and he his team has created the SkyWeather Station, which is a do-it-yourself cloud connected Weather Station and an excellent project if you and your kids or students want to learn about the Weather and the sensors used to measure it.
Besides founding multiple companies among which SwitchDoc Labs is one of them, John is actively giving talks and publishing papers about computer science related topics. He has served as Professor of Computer Science at Eastern Washington University and is also an Associate Research Faculty at the University of Idaho.
In this episode, our main focus is on the SkyWeather Station. In short: SkyWeather is a project kit with which you can easily build a cloud-connected weather station. It is a perfect technology project to learn all about the weather and how to sense the environment around you. And even though is makes use of a lot of sensors and even the very famous Raspberry PI single board computer, there is absolutely no soldering required!
When it comes to the measurements that you can perform with the SkyWeather station, the list is quite impressive: you can measure:
- Barometric Pressure
- LIGHTNING!
- Outside Temperature
- Outside Humidity
- Altitude
- Inside Temperature (in box)
- Inside Humidity (in box)
- Air Quality – AQI (your own local Air Quality Sensor)
- Sunlight
- Wind Speed
- Wind Direction
- Rain
So that is really all you ever wanted to measure about the weather! I’d say if you and your kids understand half of all these measurements at the end of such a project, you’re good to go when it comes to weather!
In this episode, we announce a special promo code for the SkyWeather Station which gives you $100 off the normal retail price. Offer valid until Dec 22 2019.
Shownotes
- SwitchDoc Labs
- John Shovic on Twitter
- Book Voice Time – Connecting Raspberry PI to Amazon Alexa
- Book Python All-in-One for Dummies
- Book Raspberry PI IoT Projects
- SkyWeather
- WeatherSTEM
- AMS Lightning Sensor – super deep dive 🙂
- Maker John Besedic explaining his SkyWeather on Youtube
- The latest OurWeather on Kickstarter
- Book: Python All-in-One for Dummies
- MouseAir Cat Toy
- SwitchDoc Labs Store