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Permalink Reply by John Hestness on April 30, 2012 at 5:54pm

Hi,  welcome,  A couple of things that occur to me are; the ardupilot comes with a pressure sensor, normally used to help with altitude control but could be used for weather I think.  Another thing to really consider is the learning curve, most of us spend at least a little time learning to fly RC first because it will be necessary/useful at times.  And there will probably be crashes along the way.  As far as rotary vs fixed, my usual answer is that rotary is better for smaller spaces or tasks requiring hovering and planes are better for large open ares.  I am pretty sure there have been some discussions on your topic in the past.  Try the search function box above or sometimes what works better is to go to google and type "website:diydrones weather" or something like that.  Hope this helps.

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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on April 30, 2012 at 6:07pm

   Some of your questions have no answers, some are matters of opinion, and the rest are certainly not easy to answer for the most part.

   If you're not comfortable with microcontroller/embedded programming you're probably not going to get very far with your project, as there really aren't any off the shelf solutions that I know of.

   You might check out http://www.aerosonde.com/  The Aerosonde UAV is used for weather monitoring and has flown into a few hurricanes before.

   OTOH just throwing some sensors on an aircraft for datalogging or even telemetry really isn't that difficult.  With a little work you can probably get them running over your telemetry link.  Then you should have your sensor data along with the time and GPS coordinates.  If that's what you're looking for it shouldn't be all that tough.

   The APM2.0 already has barometric pressure and I think temp onboard.  Getting windspeed is going to be tough considering you're using a moving vehicle that is also throwing a lot of air around.  Humidity shouldn't be terribly difficult though.

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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on April 30, 2012 at 7:30pm

I believe the pressure data is in the logs.

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Permalink Reply by John Hestness on April 30, 2012 at 6:25pm

Chris31, this is one of the best places to learn ever!  Especially if you like science and engineering.  Things change fast here so it might take some time to get up to speed and then it can be a challenge to stay caught up, at least for old guys like me.  I encourage you to spend time reading posts from the last year or so.  It sounds like you might be at the right place. 

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