Wilson is a drifting buoy powered by the sun. Wilson’s brain is an Adafruit Pro Trinket microcontroller. Its senses are an array of instruments: an air temperature sensor, a water temperature sensor, a barometer, a hydrometer (to measure relative humidity), and a GPS receiver (for location).
Wilson gathers information about its environment and transmits it to Mission Control (San Francisco, California) via satellite every 12 hours.
It’s named after Wilson the Volleyball from the movie “Cast Away“, was inspired by the MD Buoy Project., and was built by high school student Hayden Brophy in San Francisco, California.
The ultimate objective of Project Wilson is to collect oceanographic and atmospheric data about the Gulf Stream. As Wilson is carried by Gulf Stream valuable data will be collected (every 12 hours), such as water temperature, ambient air temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, and rate of speed.
Some of the parts used:
- Main Controller: Adafruit Pro Trinket 3.3v
- Motherboard: custom-designed PCB from JLCPCB
- Communications: RockBlock Iridium SBD 9603 Satellite Modem
- GPS: Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout – 66 channel w/10 Hz updates – Version 3 (Kit version)
- Solar Panel: 6v 9w Voltaic Solar Panel
- Solar Charging Module: Adafruit USB / DC / Solar Lithium Ion/Polymer charger – v2
- Temperature Sensors: DB1920 Waterproof Temperature Sensor (x3)
- Hygrometer: SHT10 Waterproof Humidity/Temp Sensor
- Barometer: MPL3115A2 – I2C Barometric Pressure/Altitude/Temperature Sensor
- Battery: 6600mah 3 cell LiPo Battery
You can follow Wilson in real time on the website here.
More in the video below and on the project website. Bravo!
No comments:
Post a Comment