Design Deveropment of weather monitoring equipment "WeatherBucket"

Abstract

Our research group developed the digital ventilated case for meteorological instruments called "Weather Bucket", which forecasts the weather by automatic observation of familiar meteorological phenomena. Originally, a science teacher at a junior high school in Katsurao-mura and a designer built the prototype, and we semicommercialized it on the educational materials development project by the then Ministry of Education. Furthermore, we proposed its miniaturization with PIC microcomputer, and conducted the implementation. Productization and commercialization were launched through the collaboration with enterprises in Hakodate. We could realize our original goals of offering it at a low price and being able to handle it easily. Having been installed the simple numerical forecast software, this product has received a high reputation from large-scale farming in Hokkaido. This report covers the details of hardware/software product designs and eight-year development process resulted from collaboration between local enterprises and a public university.