Nick and Maalick will be discussing their project. Please view the associated video resource listed below before the presentation.

Abstract:
Computer controlled weather stations are useful in the production of crops in developing countries such as Cameroon. It is essential to build a computer controlled weather station because it will increase the mapping of climate information to farming activities across Cameroon for overall crop production. The purpose of this project was to design and implement a secure database structure which will serve in the collation of data obtained from rural weather stations located all around Cameroon. We compared existing full automatic weather stations with the same features to our design. The results showed that our devices readings are more accurate due to the sensors being physical built-in Cameroon versus satellites in the sky. Our database populated information directly from the server, then posted onto an extensive weather web application with relative weather visuals. This device is an innovative need for Cameroon and it can help the country in a major way economically being that agriculture is the country's major source of revenue. The implication is that Cameroon needs a database and weather stations of its own in order to capitalize from their weather readings. Farmers will now have the ability to know what plants to produce and when to produce them, which will allow farmers to maximize profits. The weather station mainly consists of three parts namely, atmospheric sensors; controller and photovoltaic cells. The atmospheric sensors subsystem is made of an anemometer, a rain gauge, wind direction, a temperature-humidity sensor and a barometric pressure sensor. The controller sub-system is used to process, record and broadcast data read by the sensors using a WIFI technology. The WIFI technology uses an arduino board that is an open-source hardware and software project. The photovoltaic subsystem is used to power the entire weather station.