Weathering the Station, what's with that title?

When i saw the announcement of this challenge, I was interested but had no idea what to do. I've never before experimented with extreme environments, with everything I've built operating in a home environment, not exposed to extreme sunlight, temperatures or high humidity, so this challenge seemed like the perfect opportunity to explore how electronics do when exposed to extreme conditions. It should be fairly obvious that a bare PCB is not going to do well when exposed to high humidity, or straight up rain, and it should also be common knowledge that electronics in general don't like the extreme ends of the temperature range we see on earth, particularly on the upper end. This is when choosing a proper enclosure comes in.

Thanks to Hammond and element14 we were provided with an enclosure designed for outdoor use, made to withstand exposure to the elements 24/7. I then thought that this enclosure would be perfect to set up a weather station at home, and also to help with a minor inconvenience: there's no wifi in my patio! so, since we were also provided with a fairly capable computer in the form of the Raspberry Pi CM4 and its IO Board, I decided I would turn this into a combined weather station and media server, so that I can have access to my media collection when I decide to go to the patio and sit to read a book while listening to some music. 

Now, let's look at the kit:

The Unboxing:

The Enclosure:

 Hammond provided us with a 1554VA2GYCL enclosure which is made of UV stabilised polycarbonate, suited for outdoor use. The lid has a gasket made from high temperature U.L listed silicone, and while it doesn't come preinstalled, when I opened the box and saw it, I got distracted and accidentally installed it before taking a picture! 

The lid is really transparent and just as thick as the rest of the enclosure:

This feels like a very sturdy box, so if it "accidentally" happens to fall from what, let's say a meter high, with everything installed inside, I'll be sure to report how well it does, after all, isn't gravity another extreme condition to design for? 

The main body of the enclosure comes with 6 pre-installed brass inserts to screw the lid into place, and inside it also comes with 4 M3 brass inserts, as well as 10 other holes for securely mounting your project into the enclosure. 

We also received the enclosure pre-drilled with one hole to mount the provided connector:

I'm still considering adding another hole for a homemade connector, and seeing how that impacts the IP rating of the enclosure, but I'm not sure about that one yet. 

The panel mount connector:

We received as part of the kit an Amphenol MRD-BG04-L13-000 4 position panel mount connector rated IP67:

I thought I could use the metal housing of the connector as a fifth conductor, but the contact with the cable connector isn't very stable, so I ruled that one out.

The cable connector

To go with the panel mount connector, we received a matching 4 position MRDBN04M17000 connector, also from Amphenol, of course, and also IP67, of course:

The Raspberry Pi Compute module and IO Board:

The kit also included this tiny powerful computer from Raspberry Pi. It's a compute module 4, with 4GB of RAM, no on-board storage, and the official carrier IO board. This is packed with IO, having 2 full sized HDMI outputs, PoE, Pcie x1, USB 2.0 and tons more. This computer is definitely way more than needed for my project, and it's also a great device to test this enclosure to the limits as it does get pretty hot. We'll see how this does when exposed to direct sunlight.

The compute module also has an external antenna connector and we were also provided with such:

The External antenna:

There's not much to say about this antenna, it's a molex 1461530050 dual band, 2.4/5GHz 4.25dBi peak gain. Nice to have if using the Raspberry Pi with a metal enclosure, but we'll see if there's any measurable difference between this antenna and the internal antenna of the CM4.

The Display:

Also included with the kit is a MIDAS MC42005A6W-SPTLYI-V2 20x4 I2C display, which uses the RW1063 specification:

What's next? 

Not being much of a software person, I'll begin with the very basics, getting the sensors talking to the Raspberry Pi, and I'll also give the system a quick run in the enclosure, to get an idea of what the conditions inside it are when placed outside in direct sunlight and rain, and then we'll see how we go from there to the finished project!