Gateway helps put Brighton beach weather online

Brighton based electronics supplier Amplicon has been actively supporting and contributing to one of the latest projects to take place in the city, in its collaboration with Piertopier.

Brighton based electronics supplier Amplicon has been actively supporting and contributing to one of the latest projects to take place in the city, in its collaboration with Piertopier.

Piertopier is an experimental project that provides wireless Internet access on Brighton beach.

Users can connect to the Internet free of charge, when in range of any of the nodes on the seafront.

Amplicon, which is wholeheartedly behind the project, has generously donated high quality equipment for measuring the wind speed and direction at Brighton's West Pier.

Local community enterprises have always been of great importance to the company, and in this project it has provided backing through its Data Communication Product Group from an early stage.

It donated weather monitoring equipment for real time wind speed and direction logging in the form of a wind sensor and the NPort4511 programmable communication gateway starter kit, which allows systems to be controlled without the use of a PC.

The NPort4511 is a very flexible, cost effective device with greater reliability than a typical PC.

It can monitor and control serial instruments independently, as well as perform front-end data processing functions such as serial device addressing, data trimming, data tagging, encryption and character case conversion.

The NPort 4511-ST full starter kit also contains an extensive amount of support software and documentation.

The weather information provided to the Brighton community by Piertopier is available by combining the wind sensor and the NPort4511 with custom software running on the device, Piertopier nodes 1 and 2 and MRTG graphing software.

Amplicon's wind sensor detects the wind on the beach, and constantly outputs wind speed and direction on its RS422 interface.

These data are received by the serial port of the NPort4511 device, where the average wind speed is calculated and the direction and gust speed recorded.

In this particular application, an SNMP agent is also implemented, which constantly listens for queries, and in this way information is retrieved from the NPort device via its Ethernet port.

Piertopier's web server is running software that enables graphs to be built, and every 5min it sends an SNMP query to the Ethernet port on the NPort4511 to ask for wind direction, speed, and gust readings.

This query makes its way over the Internet to Piertopier node 1, and then to the NPort4511 via the wireless link between nodes 1 and 2.

The NPort4511 sends a reply back and the process is begun again.

After receiving the SNMP reply, the MRTG software updates the graphs, which are then made available on the Piertopier web server.

In addition an XML feed is produced which can be downloaded by any user.

For any water/wind sports enthusiast - windsurfers, sailing club members and others who are part of Brighton's sports community, this information is invaluable, as it directly impacts on their day's activities.

David Evans, Amplicon's Data Communications Product Manager commented: "Amplicon is always very keen to help out in the local community, and especially where a project can benefit from our area of expertise".

"We are pleased to have collaborated with Piertopier and hope to see Brighton's wireless network expand over the coming months".

Alec Waters, project manager for Piertopier added: "We are extremely grateful to Amplicon for donating the wind sensor and NPort 4511".

"It has meant that we could offer the Brighton community a way of monitoring the weather in real time, which provides many people with a real advantage in their day to day activities".

Back to top