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Old 05-12-2019, 09:12 AM
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sil (Steve)
Not even a speck of dust

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Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Canberra
Posts: 1,474
good to see your progress with this. arduino is dead simple to get into and tinker with. I often find myself reading academic papers like you did with clouds and can get enough information to be usable to refine part of how i'm measuring and other factors to take into effect. I built a lap timer just to measure tweaks I make to my coding of an autonomous driving robot. ended up having to learn about rolling averages to smooth out sensor noise and using temp/hum measurements to make precise distance calculations across the track as my method of detecting the robot passing by (as opposed to hall sensor or laser line methods but thats the beauty too of arduino you can try all these methods and see which you find most effective for your project.) As you're finding integrating with other systems can impose limits when they only accept certain values but you have the luxury to use the true values in your own custom display while passing modified values to another system calibrated to your projects scope and observations. for example you may take values of 20% as measured and transpose those to 50% so Boltwood reports cloudy.

Plus arduino is such an easy platform to replicate. I mostly use Arduino Uno as my base boards and bought an official one which is nice and stable to use as my development board then get others from ebay which are chinese clones with often dubious construction quality. hooking parts up to the cheaper board and copying the code across and its a functional copy that should give the same results. So for your project you may want to provide the info for others to replicate your build and maybe gather test data for you to help refine your coding. or maybe not if your aim is to profitise your work rather than share. but arduino is dead easy and affordable to pretty much anyone really. there is so much information out there. grab an arduino uno starter kit from ebay and go to arduino.cc and start with simple tutorials doing simple things then tinker with ideas from there. its NOT difficult.
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