Wireless temperature sensor

**angrysasquatch** · 06-21-2014, 12:39 PM

So, imagine. You've got a big face in mind to ski. You're climbing what you're going to ski. The sun will be on the face at some point, but the elevation gain is so much that the snow will be in wet sluff territory near the bottom of the face long before it will at the top. Pretty typical spring/summer ski mountaineering problem. Now, the conventional way to handle this situation is to play it super conservative and be down before the lower could possibly be too warm. However, there are so many variables that it ends up being that you end up heading down an hour or two before the actual perfect time.

What if you could place a temperature probe down on the lower face, on a slightly more easterly/southerly aspect than the majority of the run (it will get more heat from lower elevation, and sooner because of the earlier sunny aspect). Then the probe reports to another unit, or your smartphone, or whatever and tells you what the temperature is. After a few uses, you will get a good feel for what kind of corn is juuust right, and after that you can get that perfect corn, every time. Your safety margin can be based more on the current reality instead of intuition and guesstimation.

Does such a product exist in some other use? If this is more a tinkerer's toy where you'd have to combine a few gizmos, I think it's too far for bluetooth or a wireless network. Maybe RF? An update every minute or so of just a few bits of information would be more than sufficient. Shit, you could just use a standard radio as the other unit and have it transmit morse code or something. Suggestions? Ideas? Ebay links?

**Harry** · 06-21-2014, 01:43 PM

Why not get one of those infrared/laser beam heat sensors ? I bought one at Harbor Tools for like $30 and use it all the time. I shoot the laser at my walls and it tells me what spots need more insulation. I point the laser at my boat trailer and it tells me if my wheel bearings need grease. Thing is great.

Mount it on your helmet like a GoPro, feed the digital temp readout into your Google Glass equipped goggles, and go shred.

**angrysasquatch** · 06-21-2014, 02:35 PM

Well, first the distances are probably too much, hundreds of meters. If you're on a face, you've got maybe a degree or so of angle for the thing to pick up that is snow, on the face as opposed to the flats below. IIRC those things measure 5+ degrees of angle and average it. Second, since it's measuring infrared, the snow will mess it up. Might reflect infrared from another source to the detector, or if not, snow is close to a black body, it receives and emits heat very readily in IR, which I would think would also make for inaccurate readings from that kind of detector.

Something like a digital meat thermometer I think would be the way to go for the detector, a thermocouple that's stuck into the snow with the rest of the unit not getting wet.

**farmer** · 06-21-2014, 04:54 PM

The distances would be too much for a wireless meat thermometer, but a device of that style is what you're looking for. It might be possible to hook up a battery pack to a wifi telemetry system, such as a ubiquiti antenna (I use them at work). Those systems won't go through snow so you will need a pole to give line of sight to wherever you want to read it from. Then you need to have a router on either side to manage the signal.

Actually setting this up is probably impractical.

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Hugh Conway · 06-21-2014, 05:20 PM

just getyourself a drone/rc plane. solves all of the problems.

**splat** · 07-05-2014, 07:05 PM

With missiles for stability tests.

**saxon** · 07-05-2014, 07:59 PM

If you're just dropping it off on the way up and don't need it to last more than half a day, it would be pretty simple to leave a Galaxy S4 (or any other Android phone with an ambient temperature sensor) running Valarm and Yoctopuce to send you an SMS every 30 minutes with the temperature.

**angrysasquatch** · 07-07-2014, 08:18 PM

Interesting idea. A bit pricy for something I may well bury in sluff, and also the transmission method (need phone service) isn't ideal but I didn't know there were apps like that for sending alerts, smartphones are an angle I hadn't thought of.

**Tye 1on** · 07-07-2014, 08:36 PM

find a local hippy who wants to hang and bake on the lower face and radio temps up to ya on occasion?

**RedWolf** · 07-07-2014, 08:41 PM

Maybe look into weather station components? I use something similar for water quality monitoring and forecasting, and can access live info when I want. You could look into temperature sensors (and other parameters, if you wanted to get fancy) with data loggers and while it would be a little clunky and kinda expensive, it might fit what you're looking for.

**Shadam** · 07-07-2014, 09:47 PM

so how many people on the face of this planet really need this devise ???

but I understand yedi master ...

**angrysasquatch** · 07-07-2014, 10:11 PM

Hmm, this dude made a full-fledged weather station with an Arduino as the core, and communicating via 3g. My thing is starting to seem feasible. Not sure about the receiving end, but I think I could just have it transmit morse beeps over radio and either learn morse or get some program for my phone to listen and translate.

http://www.toptal.com/c/how-i-made-a...tation-for-300

Shadam, I think anybody booting up 500+m on a face on a sunny day could get use out of it. Even on the fan of a couloir, those can sometimes be overbaked without you knowing.