The NatWatch platform specification
A stackable and extensible board platform for nature observation and environmental monitoring
Another one?
This is an attempt to specify an extensible platform in the hope that it will be useful. A platform built by electronic engineers and enthusiasts for researchers in environmental sciences for nature observation and monitoring. A platform, where the actual user is not required to have soldering skills, does not have to download arduino.exe and handcraft some code, where the devices are able to withstand severe environmental conditions, be reconfigurable and extensible in the field and are made to be useful for the actual intended purpose and not playing.
For now, I selected a simple name "NatWatch" for the platform.
Motivation
The IoT hype has come to our lives in the recent years. Many large corporations and even small companies completely unknown before (start-ups), are trying to come up with IoT solutions to earn them money or to make living more awesome (various useless gadgets like the WiFi connected juicer).
Alongside such market-driven development, there is a huge amount of devices and platforms for educational purposed. They are developed (mostly) by enthusiasts to be used by the maker (another hype) community and students and usually they are freely shared in the community. Some PCB manufacturers directly support this approach by encouraging you to share your design.
Despite huge amount of devices of different quality which could be used for environmental monitoring, there are only a few actually usable by common researchers and people interested in such projects. There are professional devices which are hard to get for a reasonable price. There are devices developed by small commercial manufacturers which are technologically obsolete for almost 10 years (meteorological instrumentation and dataloggers). There are simple and commercially available devices which are usually very cheap (china-imported loggers, weather stations, automatic plant watering sensors and systems). But usually they are too simple and brain-damaged and cannot be modified to do anything sensible. And the rest of the devices available are half-finished community-built devices for education and makers (see Arduino, RaspberryPi, Beaglebone, Grove and similar and their ecosystems of extensions). For a half-professional use you have to either pay much or solder together various pieces and program it.
The solution may be a strictly and clearly defined platform robust enough to be professionally usable and simple enough to be easily extensible. And without any licensing issues.
List of compatible devices
There is not much to list for now. In the future there will be a list of compatible devices tested and known to be working with some reference implementations.
Licensing
All work done on the NatWatch platform specification is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
It is possible that in the future the licensing will change to public domain.