WeatherBrella - an IoT Project

RE: WeatherBrella - an IoT Project

COMPACT — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 23:16:03 GMT

Hi Leslie,

Why not employ some Energy Harvesting Tech and embedding and accelerometer or Gyro to make the umbrella display different colours according to ones gesturing?

Very Compact

RE: WeatherBrella - an IoT Project

DAB — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 19:53:47 GMT

Hi Leslie,

Cool idea, but you might want to think about a different approach.

Think about setting up your weather alert system to a display at your doors. You could display the umbrella needed icon as someone approaches the door to remind them that they might want to carry the umbrella before they leave.

If you use this approach, you can be more proactive in tipping yourself about its need.

Then you can have the umbrella "whine" if the user gets too far away from it while you are out.

DAB

RE: WeatherBrella - an IoT Project

shabaz — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 18:31:49 GMT

Hi Leslie,

This sounds a fantastic project. I think new use-cases will pop us as you explore this area, and the trouble will be deciding which ones to restrict yourself. For example, the umbrella could feed back temperature or actual rain (e.g. you may take the umbrella, but notice it is just cloudy and not rainy) or some other metric back to a cloud service, for more accurate information for other such subscribers to your information in your area (either via their similar umbrella, or an alert to their phone or a web page) (perhaps with only an approximate location, or anonymous, so that it cannot be used for tracking individuals purposes).

It's a great idea to consider using the mobile, and either WiFi as you say for a prototype, or BLE. I'm trying to use the latter for a project right now, but I've never written a mobile app, so it is new ground for me as well.

One idea maybe worth considering is to reuse a TI 'SensorTag', either as-is (it seems to be partially weather resistant in design) or modified slightly. The PCB inside is about 58 x 20mm. Maybe even the firmware might not need to be modified, so you can explore the mobile app space, cloud space, and the interfacing to the sensortag if the existing sensors were not ideal for your scenario.