After a really interesting evening with the sheffield swap shop crew on tuesday of this week (In the excellent CoOp on london road, make an effort to visit) @richardrixham and I retired to the red house for a beer and a chat. I’ve been meaning to post some ideas on possible #shacknet projects that tie in hardware hacking with maybe some code-oriented geekery from #geeekup… heres some starters for 10…

1. An idea Aaron and I have mucked about with in the past – The arduino weather station. The idea here is to put together instructions for building an internet connected weather station capable of reporting wind speed and direction, direct sunlight (strengh), and possibly rainfall, maybe pressure etc. Thats sorta the #shacknet half of the project. The #geekup half would involve setting up some aggregator software capable of pulling data from all installed stations and presenting it in some meaningful manner.. like a real time weather network for sheffield.

I think there are a few practical applications for this.. my personal fave is as a tool for finding the best locations for wind turbines / solar power installations. I know @richardrixham has spoken with teachers about the problelms of getting this funded as an electronics project in schools, but I wonder if there is a way to just get it as a “Self assembly weather station” and do the electronics thing by stealth… anyone really interested could get the info and build one at home. I don’t doubt that if we had a quick brainstorm we could come up with oodles of add-on sensors and other instrumentation…. any thoughts?

2. Project 2 seems like a fun hardware/software/network mash-up too… inspired by the LETS scheme in sheffield. Richard and I were wondering if we could build a hardware terminal and some software to act as an epos device for the stones (The LETS unit of currency) used by all the current LETS schemes… basically a cash card for stones. We’d need to design and build a terminal with some security, and do the same job on the “Bank” server…. My exposure to LETS is only minimal at the moment, but I’m hoping to get more involved and am currently signing up… seems like an internet service for your LETS account would be quite a cool thing to have?

Just a brief update…. Any thoughts?