Here are a few of the bees that have visited our garden so far this weekend:

Bee from rickymoorhouse on Vimeo.

For a while I've been meaning to write up the details of the Raspberry Pi weather station that I have built with my eldest daughter. This project builds on a number of examples I've seen across the internet, particularly sensing the weather. This details how our system is put together.

Temperature monitoring

We took two temperature sensors and mounted them in a garden post with one pushed down to the bottom for soil temperature and one in the cap for the air temperature. The one-wire sensors can share the same three wires, so are both connected to a wire leading back to the Raspberry Pi through a hole drilled into the side of the post. For waterproofing we surrounded the whole with hot glue. The post is situated in a shady spot and pushed about 30 centimeters deep in the soil.

Wind speed

You can see my graphs of the data, and the code is on github.

For a while I've had a variation on my map of the places I've visited - here's a summary of how my current version is working.

The whole site is currently generated by hugo, a static site generator with no server side component. The map is powered by MapBox GL which lets me choose any of the mapbox styles to use for my map. I create a markdown file for each place on the map, with the latitude and longitude in the 'front matter' for the post which looks something like this:

    ---
    title: "Salto"
    layout: travel
    datePosted: 2003
    photo: "/travel/image.jpg"
    lat: -31.387022
    lng: -57.968802
    ---

I then have a list layout for travel items which will generate GeoJSON data from the list of places. In my current version of the map this is inline within the page and fed directly into the Mapbox javascript method like this (roughly based on the Mapbox GeoJSON points tutorial):

        ...
        map.addLayer({
            "id": "places",
            "type": "circle",
            "source": {
                "type": "geojson",
                "data": {
                    "type": "FeatureCollection",
                    "features": [
        {{ range .Pages }}
                    {
                        "type": "Feature",
                        "geometry": {
                            "type": "Point",
                            "coordinates": [{{ .Params.lng }}, {{ .Params.lat }}]
                        },
                        "properties": {
                            "title": "{{ .Title }}",
                            "description": "{{ .Content }}"
                        }
                    },
        {{ end }}
                    ]
        ...