As many lake-goers at Conesus know, weather is pretty random all of the time. It rains, it gets windy, sometimes you get the thunderstorms – All of which you can just look at a normal forecast for. But what about the water? Is is rough out, maybe too rough to boat safely? Is the water freezing or just right for swimming? All of which is privately monitored or not monitored at all. Thats where building and placing a weather buoy would come in.
I’m Zachary DuBois. My main hobby is problem solving, coding, and building things to make life easier. I am going to be teamed up with my cousin to build a data-logging weather buoy that will monitor over 30 different water and air sensors and report to a website that will be publicly available for everyone. This includes, water turbidity (clarity/color), temperature, wave data (amplitude, frequency, direction), and many others listed below.
All of this data is useful for fishing, checking to see if it would be good to go boating, swimming, letting you know if the water rises above your dock, and checking if it is a good swim day. And of course, it can be used for scientific research of the lake to find more trends and possibly predicting as we gather more data. But collecting the amount of data we want requires quite a bit of equipment which is where you can help us out. A lot of the equipment is out of a high schooler’s price range – Hence the campaign.
We need contributions to be able to afford to build this buoy. We estimate it to be $5,000 but have made our goal to be $7,500 to account in the a safety price incase a component breaks or we need to make a major change while we are building it. Any excess money that cannot be put towards a stretch goal below will be donated to the Conesus Lake Association and/or a charity. A full price breakdown with all the parts and their prices will be available in a few days of the campaign going live.
Supporting our project will definitely place you permanently as someone who help this project happen on the website and you will receive a thank you email from me to show my thanks. You also receive what is indicated on the perk you select. Perks include:
If we exceed our goal, we want to create a few other small projects to go with this buoy. They are listed below.
If we were to not reach our goal we have a few fallback plans detailed below.
As with any project of this scale, there are some major risks and challenges that we will have to overcome.
Some of our risks are:
And our challenges:
Everyone can support this project in a major way. Either by backing or sharing it with your friends and neighbors.
There are many ways you can contact me.
Or via snail mail:
Zachary DuBois
Attn: Conesus Lake Weather Buoy
PO Box 116
Rush, NY 14543
United States