This is my first year teaching. I teach at Whitney Young High School in Chicago. We are located directly west of the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower). At the beginning of the year, I would get to work extremely early and had breathtaking views of the sunrise from the school's bridge over Jackson Avenue.
Fast forward a few months....
I can no longer get myself out of bed early enough to see the sunrise and I just attended this great workshop on raspberry pi's. Together this idea emerged: My advanced CS students are going to program a raspberry pi to take a timelapse of the sunrise every day for a week. Additionally they will collect temperature and humidity data and have all of this hosted on a website. If this reminds you of NASA's Astronomy Picture of The Day a few years back, good for you! I am loosely basing the project on this. I like the idea of the temperature and humidity data being mapped out along with the physical images of the sunrise.
Anyway, back to the project. I have two groups of students working on this. The roles are split up as so:
1. One person will design a housing for the Raspberry Pi in Google Sketchup and 3d print it on a Makerbot Replicator. The purpose of the box is threefold. First it has to keep out rain so we will likely seal it with polyurethane or cover the roof in plastic wrap. The walls should let some air through otherwise the temperature and humidity data wouldn't be accurate. Second, it must hold the camera in the same position throughout the week, above the small lip on the edge of the roof.
2. A second person will be in charge of programming the time lapse. It should begin every day at a certain time and end at a certain time. I had toyed with the idea of using a photo resistor to trigger the time lapse, but that might be too complicated and I like the idea of them seeing the sun rising earlier and earlier each day.
3. A third person will be in charge of the temperature and humidity sensing program. The data will be collected every minute and stored in a google spreadsheet. This data collection will be ongoing, not limited to sunrise.
4. A fourth person will create a website to display all of this information. I would like the sunrise timelapse to show as the sun is rising, then when it shuts off, be processed into a video and uploaded to youtube. This might require another person... The youtube video will be embedded on the website along with a real time graph of the temperature and humidity data.
Here are the materials we are using:
1. Raspberry Pi
2. Raspberry Pi Camera
3. Temperature and Humidity Sensor - I had considered getting something more outdoor-friendly, but I couldn't find anything. Recommendations anyone?
I'll let you all know how it goes! Gotta go talk to the engineers about getting on the roof.
Bye!
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