Suitability question [first post]

General
1

I just stumbled onto Particle when Googling for ideas for my project. Admittedly, I haven’t read much and before I dive too far into to, I wanted to just ask if this is the right direction for me.

I have SOME but not much experience with programming and hardware.

I want to set up a small solar powered “weather station” (not really, but we’ll call it that). I need a device that can:

a) accept a cellular signal to turn on the weather station
b) send back data it receives from the weather station

The data is very small (a few hunded bytes per day). The weather station runs on 12V and I intend to power everything via solar.

The area it is going to be installed in won’t be within wifi range but should have cellular signal.

Does that sound feasible?

2

Particle Electron to the rescue.

Rather than polling the station, it may be easier if you slept the device and woke up once in a while to xmit your data.

Search Electron Weather Station on this site, you are bound to find something to lead you along!

3

Thanks for the reply.

I have to figure out the best way to go about it… first step was just seeing if this is the right path to take. It looks like the Electron is exactly what I need.

I need it to send me data and you’re right that waking up may be better than polling… however, I also need to be able to send it a signal for an on-demand response.

Back to the weather station concept (as an analogy): let’s say I want to learn what the weather conditions are at the site and then, once I get a set of conditions I am satisfied with, I want to send a signal to launch a balloon.

Something like that anyway… I’m very early in my process.

4

If you are ok consuming data (some modest cost) to leave your device available to be triggered at any time, you can certainly do what you want to do.

5

Can you clarify why that would consume data? Perhaps I’m over-simplifying, but I can call you at any time on your cell phone and you don’t use any minutes waiting for the call… so why would it use any data waiting for the trigger? Can we not “call” these devices?