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✛ Monitoring
local weather forecasting capabilities. In regions such as Central Africa, for example, changing atmospheric conditions make accurate forecasting difficult, and gathering localised air data can make a big difference. Sparvio Sparv also recognises the wider need for sensor integration with mobile systems – especially drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Fixed stations gather long time series data, but are not always the best choice for mapping distribution over an area. They can also be inflexible when responding to fast-evolving events such as wildfires, and expensive to install in all locations of interest, and finding variations at different altitudes traditionally requires a tall mast with multiple sensors, which is a very expensive and inflexible option. With this in mind, Sparv developed a generic platform – Sparvio – to connect small sensors to mobile systems. Sparvio is a state-of-the-art sensor equipment that provides a modular, plug-and-play solution for measuring various quantities for UAVs, other environmental studies, lab experiments and education. The Sparvio system is designed to start immediate measurements without any further integration. Today Sparv offers sensors such as T/ RH, winds, CO2, O3, CH4 and PM, and is happy to support more sensors on customer requests. Sparvio equipment is fully compatible with Windsond. The system supports a large number of simultaneously connected modules and can freely be rearranged by the user thanks to its universal connectors. For ultimate flexibility, Sparv opted to make each sensor smart. New low-cost sensors raise hopes of much denser measurements of particles, CO2, methane, VOC, SO2 and other variables, but they can be more difficult to integrate than high-cost sensors. Data gathered by low-cost sensors may require some post-processing (to iron our performance biases or convert data from analogue to digital, for example), while high cost sensors often come with in-built intelligence that does this automatically. However, the Sparvio framework makes such integration a breeze and includes many features
UAV equipped with nine sensors performs mapping of natural emissions of CO2 from Swedish lakes
only found on expensive sensors. Instead of keeping all logics and calibration in a central data logger, our small adapter boards are loaded with a software driver for the sensor. Now even third-party sensors become plug-and-play and can be hot-swapped in the field. Easy, no-configuration installation like this is especially important on UAVs, where a hard landing can require replacing a sensor far from the workshop. Historically, high density sounding has been too expensive and demanding for many NMHSs to implement successfully. Today, Sparv’s low cost, flexible systems make the gathering of dense air measurement more affordable and achievable than ever before. ✛ Author: Anders Petersson, CEO/CTO Sparv Embedded