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MN Space Grant Consortium gave us one mission: build a solar-powered weather station that keeps transmitting even when buried in dirt and snow. No grid power. No human help. Just engineering, creativity, and a $500 budget.
SELF-CLEANING MECHANISM
A light sensor on the top and bottom of the panel monitored output. When enough blockage was detected, it triggered a servo motor to drive a wiper arm across the panel surface, clearing debris by mechanical sweep.
SENSOR SUITE
Four environmental sensors fed data continuously — temperature, humidity, pressure, and UV index — transmitted via an Arduino Nano.
BUDGET DISCIPLINE
Kept the full build under $500 through careful component selection and sourcing.
Demo video — replace with your embed
YouTube / Vimeo iframe goes hereMore sensor coverage — We only used a light sensor on the top and bottom of the panel. If both happened to be blocked at the same time, the wiper or rotation wouldn't trigger at all. More distributed sensing — or a different detection strategy — would have made the system more reliable.
Design for the edge case first — The obvious failure mode (partial blockage hitting both sensors) was something we only fully understood in retrospect. Starting with "how does this break?" before "how does this work?" would have changed some early design decisions.
Based in St. Louis Park, MN. Open to roles in engineering, ops, product, and anything that involves building something real. Whether you want to talk shop, swap travel recs, or compare notes on whatever deep dive you've been on lately — I'm here for it.