The Weather Station II

by Michael Shaw, June 2012

Front panel of the Weather Station II

 

This article describes a weather station I designed to provide a way of monitoring and recording daily local weather activity. I call it the Weather Station II, or WSII. It utilizes the Dallas Semiconductors 1-Wireâ Interface that supports a variety of sensors that can be used to accurately measure atmospheric phenomena. Multiple devices can be connected to the WS II using a single standard phone cable.

A list of the WSII features:

* Uses Dallas Semiconductor 1-Wireâ Interface

* Supports multiple devices using a single cable

* Measures Rain in .01” resolution

* Menu driven operation using a 5 Button input Panel

* Real Time Clock Calendar (RTCC)

* Measure temperatures in Centigrade or Fahrenheit

* Display time in 12 or 24 hour format

* Temperature range from -55 to 68°C (–67 to +180 ° F)

* Sensors accurate to +/- 1 degree C

* Connects using standard telephone cable

The weather instruments are mounted on PVC pipe that is attached to the house or roof.

Weather Station II sensors mounted on house

The WSII is powered from a 12VDC wall wart and provides a built-in 9V battery backup which will keep the unit powered for about 1 hour in case power is interrupted. A year’s worth of daily records data (wind, rain and temperature) is stored in non-volatile Read Only Memory (ROM) and will be retained even if the power is shut-off and the backup battery is removed from the unit.

Daily Recorded Data 

The unit utilizes a Dallas DS18S20 Temperature Sensor and DS2334 Dual Counter modules. These modules are available from a company called Hobby Boards (www.hobby-boards.com). PVC pipe is used to mount and house the modules and weather instruments. The dual counter module is used to collect wind and rain data. The rain collector was purchased from a company called Davis Instruments (www.Davis.com) and the anemometer was purchased from a company called Fascinating Electronics Inc. (www.fascinatingelectronics.com).

The Weather Station controller is an ATMega128 development board from Sparkfun Electronics (www.sparkfun.com). It has a 2 line, 16 character LCD screen, 5 push buttons, RS232 interface circuit, Dallas iButton port, Relay with 10A/250VAC contacts, Buzzer and Status LED.

The controller functions are all written in C code. I developed the Dallas 1wire interface after researching the protocol specifications on their website (www.dallas.com). This code was originally developed for a PIC processor (the WSI), and later developed for the Atmel Atmega128 processor.

The WS II unit features are accessed from a system of menus using the front panel buttons. The weather data display items are accessed using the MAIN menu and the configuration of the weather station options are accessed through the SETUP menu. The menu hierarchy is as follows:

WSII Menu Hierarchy

The WSII has been successfully deployed in 2 locations, one in Sunrise, Fl and the other in Atlantic Beach, Fl. The units have been used to gather data for a couple of years. This data is used to keep track of monthly temperature and rain totals.

The WSII was a project to measure weather data in realtime and save the data for later analysis. The project has been a success and future projects are planned. Some of the desired features for a future weather station are adding barometer and wind direction sensors. These should give me the ability to provide weather prediction to the weather station in the future.    

How to Make Beer

By Michael Shaw June 2012

Finally getting to the good stuff, how to make beer. In this article I’ll tell you how to make a good red ale beer that won’t disappoint. Beer is made up of only 4 ingredients, yeast, water, malt and hops and nothing else, in my opinion. A pumpkin or lemon beer is not really beer. This article is for people who want to make a full bodied, good tasting beer without too much trouble. There are two kinds of beers, ales and lagers and they use different yeasts. In this article I explain how to make ale beer. Ales ferment at higher temperatures and lagers ferment at lower temperatures.

The Perfect Red Ale

In my process there are 5 steps to making beer, 1) boiling the brew, 2) chilling the brew, 3) pitching the yeast 4) fermenting, and finally 5) bottling. There can be various versions of these steps in advanced beer making, like 2^nd fermentation for instance, which I can get to in future articles, but these are the basic steps to making this beer.

What You Need

Before you can make beer you’ll need some materials. The first thing you’ll need is a large 3-5 gallon stainless steel brewpot. The larger the brewpot, the more brew you can make and the less water you need. Conversely, the larger the brewpot, the harder it is to cool off, because you want to chill the brew as fast as you can to avoid contamination.

You’ll need a brewing spoon with a long handle that’s needed to stir 3 gallons of liquid when it’s boiling.  

The next thing you’ll need is a fermenting vessel. This is an air tight vessel that is large enough to hold all of the beer you plan to make, usually a 7 gallon plastic bucket. I usually make beer in 5 gallon batches because it is a manageable quantity. This will make two - 2.5 gallon kegs or approximately 52 - 12 ounce bottles.

You’ll need an airlock for the fermenter. This is a device that lets the CO2 that is produced by the yeast during fermentation to escape, while preventing any air from getting in. It’s a simple device, and I’ve even heard of a balloon being used to perform this task.

Fermenter with airlock and valve

You’ll also need to attach a valve to the bottom of the fermenting bucket or use a hose or racking cane to transfer the beer into bottles when the fermenting is finished.

You’ll need 3 cheese cloth bags and about 3ft of string. I place the hops into the bags and tie them shut with the string during the hopping stage.

The last thing you’ll need is at least 52 bottles, bottle caps and a bottle capper.

The ingredients for this red ale are:       

                                    Crystal Malt Extract               3.3 LBS can

                                    Pale Malt Extract                    3.3 LBS can

                                    *Wyeast                                  #1028

                                    Bittering hops 60 mins            1oz Northern Brewer

                                    Flavoring hops 40 mins           1oz Tettnang

Finishing hops 20 mins           1oz Fuggles

Ice                                           5 Lbs

Note: this article assumes the beer maker is using easy to use pitchable yeast packages available from Wyeast Labs. These yeast packages speed up the beer making process, allowing the yeast to be started only hours before it’s needed. Without these packages a sufficient amount of yeast will have to be propagated days before the beer making process can begin. Read the directions on the package for more information.

Wyeast pitchable yeast ready for use

Keep it Clean

Avoiding contamination is the key to successfully making beer. When you make beer, you are making an environment of sweet stuff (sugars) that the yeast love to eat, and this is a good thing. But unfortunately other things like to eat that stuff too, so the trick is to make sure the other things aren’t around when it’s time to feed the yeast. This is accomplished by sterilizing all of your utensils before you start brewing beer. I do this by cleaning everything with a diluted bleach solution, 3-5 drops of bleach per gallon of cold water. Clean your fermenter and utensils with this solution and allow it to sit for at least 15 min then rinse them with clean water thoroughly.  

Let’s Brew It!

The malt in the cans is a thick syrup, so placing the cans in hot water beforehand will allow it to pour out easier. Place the brewpot on the stove and pour about a gallon of water into the brewpot. Turn the stove burner on medium and allow the water to heat up.

Hot water makes malt flow easier

When the water is hot, pour both cans of malt into the water and stir thoroughly.  Add some more water to fill the brewpot to about ¾ full and turn the stove burner up to high and bring the liquid to boil, but be careful. The liquid will have a tendency to foam up and boil over making a mess of the stove (and making your wife boil over!) Keep stirring the liquid and regulate the stove temperature to avoid this condition.

After the liquid has boiled for about 10 mins, place the Northern Brewer hops into one of the cheese cloth bags and tie the bag closed with the string. Place the bag of hops into the brewpot.

Hops placed in cheese cloth bag

Allow the liquid to boil for about 20 minutes, then place the Tettnang hops into a cheese cloth bag, tie the bag closed with the string and place the hops into the brewpot. After another 20 minutes do the same with the Fuggles hops. Allow the liquid to boil another 20 min, then turn the stove burner off. The liquid at this stage of beer making is commonly referred to as the wort.

Remove the hop bags from the wort. Place the brewpot into the sink and chill the wort by placing several pounds of ice around the outside of the brewpot. Keep replenishing the ice around the base of the brewpot until the outside of the pot is no longer hot.

Ice is used to chill the wort

Make sure the drain valve is closed then put about a gallon of water into the fermenter. Now carefully pour the contents of the brewpot into the fermenter, and fill the fermenter up to the 5 gallon mark with additional water. Stir the liquid with the brewing spoon to make sure it’s thoroughly mixed. 

Open the yeast package you started earlier and pour the contents into the fermenter. Stir the yeast in vigorously with the brewing spoon, making sure to slosh it around alot, this is known as “pitching the yeast”.

Now seal the fermenter lid onto the top of the fermenter and insert the airlock into the grommet on top of the lid. Place the fermenter in a cool (not cold) dark area, then pour vodka or gin (you can also use water) into the airlock to provide an airtight seal. Now wait for a day or two to allow fermentation to begin.

You can tell when fermentation has begun when you see the cup in the airlock lifting up and down with each release of a CO2 bubble. If you don’t see this happening after about a week, then something is wrong. It’s possible fermentation never got started, maybe contamination was introduced into the process. But if everything is good, the little cup in the airlock will be going up and down happily for several days. After about a week, fermentation will be finished and now it’s ready for bottling.

Bottling

In my opinion, bottling the beer takes all the fun out of beer making. It’s a chore to collect all 52 of those bottles, then have to clean and sterilize each one. When I did bottle beer, I used Amstel Light beer bottles because I liked the beer. More importantly, these were perfect brown glass bottles, didn’t have the twist-off caps and all the labels came right off with a little soap and warm water. I keg my beer now, but that’s a topic for the advanced beer making article.

Bottling beer is the cheapest way to package your beer, though. The only thing you need are bottles, bottle caps and a bottle capper. After the bottles have been cleaned and sterilized, fill them to about a half inch from the top with beer, then press a cap on it. That’s pretty much it. Store the bottled beer in a cool dry place for about a month, then it’s ready to drink.

Notes on Surviving a Hurricane

by Michael Shaw June 2012

Hurricane season is upon us once again, so I decided to take the notes I made after hurricane Wilma struck us in 2005 while living Ft Lauderdale and compile them into the following post:

On Oct 24, 2005 hurricane Wilma came through South Florida around 6AM with sustained wind speeds in Broward County of around 89 mph. It was considered a category (cat) 3 storm when it made landfall just south of Naples, weakening to a strong cat 1 or weak cat 2 when it left through Palm Beach Co. The storm came from the Gulf and made a southeast track across Miami, Broward and Palm Beach counties. There were 3.2 million people without power in Miami, Broward and Palm Beach after the storm went through. The track of the storm followed almost exactly the track forecasted by the hurricane center. Most of the damage was downed trees and power lines, but not a significant amount of structure damage.

We suffered some landscape damage and almost lost our Macadamia Nut tree in the back yard, but most of the damage in the area was to the vegetation. A few people lost the roofs of their house, but mostly everybody’s roof just lost shingles if it was older than 5 years. People didn’t want their roofs to leak, so they protected the roof with blue tarps. This became a popular image on every street and became the calling card for hurricanes since. There wasn’t much rain during the storm and no flooding, because it moved extremely fast and was gone into the Atlantic in about 6 hours.

We didn’t board up, even though the storm was a cat 3. I expected it to miss us and go farther north and diminish in intensity, but it didn’t and practically went right over us. I had to hold a sliding glass door in place for fear it would have blown out, because it was bowing in and out and it wouldn’t take much for it to pop off the bottom track. This was a late season storm and a lot of us S. Floridians were caught off guard. I later learned what actually happen: the storm intensified in strength when it went over the warm waters of the Everglades. Nobody realized this would happen at the time, they all thought that because it was over land, it would lose strength.

The key to surviving after a hurricane is to prepare before the hurricane, because afterwards, it’s too late.

Before a hurricane you should:

                        gather all of your supplies together in a central location

turn the refrigerators and freezers temperature to coldest

have flashlights candles or lanterns ready

store plenty of drinking water for 3-5 days

                        keep a couple of frozen chickens in the freezer

make and store plenty of ice in the freezer during hurricane season

have plenty of food in easy open cans (tuna fish, pb&j, bread)

get paper plates, cups, ect.

                        have plenty of cash on hand, 500+ dollars, in small denominations

                        fill up the gas tanks in your vehicles before the storm hits

                        have plenty of propane gas and flashlight batteries

                        have a jug of unadulterated (no perfume) bleach on hand

                              

I’ll explain the reason for some of this, when I tell you next what happens after a hurricane hits.

It was still daylight after the storm hit, so we ventured out to assess the damage. This could be a dangerous situation in the dark, but I could see and knew that there were no downed power lines. The power had gone out during the storm, so we began our damage control.  We didn’t open the refrigerator or freezer for several hours unless we absolutely had to. The items in the fridge will keep for quite awhile, provided you don’t open it up.

We had an efficient solar and crank powered radio that charges in the sun, lasts a long time on a charge and a little TV that ran on batteries to find out what the general situation was in Broward County. The cable was out and cell phones didn’t work so we were lucky we had a land line phone (the old fashion kind without the answering machine) that worked to call relatives and let them know we were ok. News reports were saying that a big power line feeding the county had come down and that power would be out for an extended period of time. We got our lights, flashlights and lanterns ready because night was coming and you have to see to go to the bathroom. It gets dark at night when the whole county is without power, very dark. You can use candles inside the house for light, but they can be dangerous. We have a camping lantern that uses LP gas canisters, it creates a lot of light and last a long time. I only used it out on the back patio. The canisters can also be used the camping stove we had for cooking and stored for the next years storm if needed. Just be sure not to use these items inside the house.

We were lucky because we had city water the whole time. The gas lines in the city were still working, so our gas water heater provided hot water for showers. A lot of places didn’t have water or had boil water alerts. You can use bleach to treat the water if you’re not able to boil it. If you use paper plates, they can be discarded so you don’t have to use your water to clean the dishes.  If you didn’t have water, then you’d have to get some pretty soon, so lines began to form after a couple of days at places that were giving out water. Lines also began to form for ice too. We had about 14 zip-lock freezer bags of ice in the freezer and a couple of frozen chickens. The chickens we had in the freezer remained frozen solid for 3 or 4 days. We eventually transferred these into a cooler and managed to get by for about 5 days with the ice we had. We had BBQ chicken on day 4, which was a nice treat.

Some people had generators they used to power their appliances, and after a couple of days you saw mile long lines waiting to get gas at the only stations (1 or 2 in Broward) that had generators to power the gas pumps. I’m not a big fan of generators, they’re expensive, noisy and can be dangerous. If you do have a generator, make sure to buy a carbon monoxide detector and use it, and keep the generator away from the house. I prefer to use solar panels to charge deep cycle marine batteries. Then I run an inverter off the batteries to run my ac equipment. This seems of work pretty good, as long as you don’t require a lot of power.

I did have one of the batteries fail during the course of this adventure, so I had to go out and buy another one. Which brings me to my last point, if you do manage to find a store that is open, they don’t have ATM machines, credit or debit card capability, so you better have some cash. If they do have a cash register, it’s better if you can supply them with the exact change. They may not be willing or able to accept bills larger than $20.

This isn’t the definitive guide to hurricane survival, it’s just my experience. When something like this happens, there are a lot of things you can do to be better prepared.  According to FEMA everyone should be able to survive 3 days before help arrives. This is because roads are blocked and power lines are down, and you need to sit tight until help can arrive.