Overview
In the summer of 2010, a Data Aquisition System (DAQ) was designed. Soon after, it was turned off due to other problems. In the summer of 2012, a new system was designed by a High School Student. This new system utilizes a different microcontroller, and does not require a dedicated DAQ computer to request data, thereby saving energy. It is also built entirely upon open sourced technologies (with the sole exception of the graphing library). This data is now available in real-time on the graphs page.
Microcontroller
The controller connected to the anemometer is an Arduino(TM) Uno using the ATMega 328 chip. It is supplemented by an Ethernet board (Using the Wiznet W5100 controller) designed for the Arduino that serves the data to the sustain.ece server. The microcontroller samples wind speed and direction every second, and then every 30 seconds averages the collected data, sending that data to the server. The server is not in control of when it gets data, since data is "pushed" from the microcontroller.
Anemometer
The anemometer outputs pulses indicating its speed and an analog voltage indicating its direction. The microcontroller samples this data, performs some basic calculations, and sends the resulting values to the computer. Read more about the anemometer on the Anemometer page.
Server
The server is virtualized, running Linux CentOS. It also serves this webpage. When the server recieves data from the microcontroller, it enters this data into a MySQL database using a PHP script. When a user visits the DAQ webpage, the server pulls that data from the database, and displays it to the user.
