WeatherFlow December Update
Hello WeatherFlow Backers.
There are now over 1100 live reporting WeatherFlow stations across the globe! AIR + HUB have been delivered to all backers who ordered prior to August 2017 and completed a BackerKit address confirmation / survey prior to October 15th and opted to receive AIR + HUB early. If you ordered after August 2017 or opted to receive AIR + HUB + SKY later, your delivery will be sent once development on SKY is final and we can ship out complete weather stations.
SKY Progress
SKY is currently still in development, leveraging data gathered from dozens of field testers to tune firmware and to discover small issues that can only come from real-world testing. See a live SKY test station. Here are some of the challenging issues we are working on right now:
Calibration. The single biggest issue our hardware team is focused on is developing a fast & reliable calibration and QA process for SKY. The process initially took an entire day for each field test SKY device. We’ve cut that down to about 2 hours per device. Our milestone goal is to get this down to 10 minutes per device to scale for final production.
Rain. In light rain, the SKY’s haptic sensor algorithms must distinguish between real rain and non-rain sources of vibration input. We’re improving those algorithms with each new set of rain event data. Our milestone goal is to detect the lightest rain possible while rejecting 99% of false positives.
Wind. As with all sonic anemometers, when something other than air (like rain or snow) gets between the ultrasonic transducers of the SKY, the wind speed measurement can be affected. Our milestone goal is to train the software to identify and correct suspect data automatically.
Sun. Over the last year we evaluated more than a dozen light sensors and have been testing the top two candidates in the field. Our research has clearly identified a winner. Now our goal is to complete the calibration of this new sensor and ensure highly accurate values for solar radiation, UV, and brightness in real world conditions.
Delivery Estimate
There are still too many unknowns to provide a reliable expected delivery date for SKY. We realize that you are eager to know a definitive date, but we simply cannot provide a date with a responsible degree of confidence. That said, we can keep you updated with progress against the milestone goals noted above in the coming weeks.
Project tidbits
Amazon Alexa integration now live in US, UK, Canada and India.