Inspiration and Function
Most of the time, students find themselves rushing to get ready in the mornings before they head to their first class. They throw on the first items of clothing they can get their hands on and rush out the door. It's no wonder students are always completely unprepared for the rain and cold. Introducing the Windowsill Weather Buddy, a device that measures the humidity and temperature outside, and tells you how many layers you'll need to wear!
What it Does
The Windowsill Weather Buddy measures the environment's temperature, humidity, and light intensity (sunlight) and utilizes these real time values to provide the user with a recommendation of how many layers to wear outside. The weather measurements and layer-recommendation is displayed on a web dashboard that's easy to read and interpret.
How We Built It
In order to build the Windowsill Weather Buddy, we used a DHT11 sensor, a photo-resistor, and the NodeMCU. Our device measures and displays the humidity, temperature, and light-intensity values and displays them to the Serial Monitor while also relaying them to the Adafruit dashboard. Within our code we've created an algorithm that weighs each quantity differently to provide the user with the most accurate recommendation of layers to wear.
Challenges We Ran Into
We ran into a few challenges with our device. We initially intended to have the Windowsill Weather Buddy send SMS messages through the Blynk app directly to the user. We were unable to get our code to work with Blynk through the NodeMCU, and we had a lot of trouble with our actuator. However, after hours of trial and error, we were able to utilize the Adafruit.io web dashboard instead to display the weather readings and layer recommendations.
Accomplishments We're Proud Of
Despite the challenges we faced in integrating the Internet of Things into our project, we're glad we were able to create a more in-depth and sophisticated dashboard instead of the simple text messages we planned to send. Particularly, we're proud of how we were able to create and implement an algorithm that utilized all of the real time weather measurements!
What We Learned
We definitely gained a better understanding of circuitry when it came to the hardware side of our project, and we also learned how to integrate hardware and software by creating an algorithm that takes in quantities measured via hardware and returns its own results.
What's Next For Team 28, Windowsill Weather Buddy
Given the chance to improve the WWB, we would definitely want to try again with the Blynk app and add. the notification component to our user experience. Another avenue we want to explore would be modifying our algorithm to adjust for user preferences. As the number of layers someone wants to wear can be subjective, it would be beneficial to allow the user to tailor their WWB to their preferences.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.