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Igniting interest in weather station technologies

March 10, 2025
By Yuri Bult-Ito

A team of ACEP undergraduate assistants working on cyber technology projects recently introduced North Pole High School students to weather station technologies and the concepts behind them.

Weather stations provide a suite of different instruments to measure environmental conditions, such as temperature, wind speed and humidity, and transmit data wirelessly to a receiver or a display on a personal computer via sensors.

Petie Deveer and Hailey Hodgins are working on a project to evaluate data transmission methods that would enable the use of sensors remotely. Their project focuses on open-source, off-grid, decentralized network tools to stream weather station data to a location away from the station. Adrian Burke is testing a wide range of existing commercially available atmospheric sensors that can be used in remote communities in ��������.

At the high school, the team helped the students use Raspberry Pi’s — a series of low-cost computers built on a single circuit board used for educational purposes — to work on programming.

The students gathered around their wooden Raspberry Pi boxes and tackled the tasks with curiosity. They connected NodeRED flows — a visual programming tool for wiring hardware devices —to isolate temperature and humidity data coming from the sensor.

Learning how to program on the Raspberry Pi will allow students to interface with live weather information to create a public display of collected data such as on a website, or to program a device to respond to data with solutions, such as an automated switch turning up a heater when the temperature drops.

Helping students was a rewarding opportunity for the team to improve their software and hardware after preparing and troubleshooting the technology for the past few months.

“It shows how far our project has progressed towards the goal of providing educational experiences for students,” Hodgins said.

Working with students was also insightful for the team in improving ways to help them understand and use the technology.

“Doing this sort of work alongside high school students interested in learning technology is the perfect way to stay grounded,” said their mentor Dayne Broderson, referring to the benefit of increasing their own understanding of the technology they use and of gaining skills to effectively communicate with those who may not have the same level of expertise.

The team and students celebrated the students’ firm grasp of the new concepts with pizza at the end of the event.

The team members are University of �������� Fairbanks undergraduate students, with Burke majoring in computer engineering, Deveer, in computer science, and Hodgins, in mathematics.

Deveer and Hodgins’ project, “Powering and Unifying Long-range Sensor Ecosystems,” and Burke’s project, “Sensor Technology for �������� Rural Communities Targeting Remote Atmospheric Monitoring,” are supported by NSF EPSCoR STORM project, the Office of Naval Research’s and ��������’s Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Activity.