Industrial IoT - How to Build Your Own Outdoor Pagoda for Weather, Air Quality, and Other Sensors

**Update: The article below is from our legacy Android app! Valarm is Industrial IoT. We'll help you, your teams, and your business with Industrial IoT applications using Tools.Valarm.net.

If you want to save time and money you can just get your outdoor pagodas and sensor enclosures here at shop.valarm.net. We highly recommend these sensor cases, pagodas, enclosures, boxes, much more than the fun experiment done below.

We recommend using GSM, WiFi, or ethernet connector devices / sensors hubs with any industrial sensors since they're much more reliable than Androids for Industrial IoT applications like:

• Natural resources
• Chemical cleaning companies
• Agriculture
• Oil & gas
• Hydraulics and Fluids Power
  
• Industrial cleaning services
• Governments
• Bridges and Civil Engineering
  
• Petroleum
• Water resources management
• Chemical distribution
• Fluids monitoring

You can use Valarm Industrial IoT, telemetry and remote sensor monitoring solutions with any of the following connector devices / sensor hubs:

• WiFi Sensor Hub
  
• Ethernet Sensor Hub
  
• GSM Sensor Hub

Valarm Industrial IoT sensor data is GPS-tagged, time-stamped, and sent to Valarm Tools Cloud / tools.valarm.net via any internet connectivity like WiFi, ethernet, or cell network. With Valarm Tools Cloud you’ll find services for mapping, graphing, and APIs like JSON to help you with your real-time, geo-enabled sensor monitoring and Industrial IoT applications.

Valarm compatible sensors + Industrial IoT hardware are available at shop.valarm.net.

Have a look at Valarm's Industrial IoT Customer Stories page for more on what businesses and organizations are using these remote sensor monitoring and telemetry solutions and deploying Industrial IoT applications in a variety of industries.

Learn how all of this works together on our Web Dashboards for Industrial IoT, Telemetry, + Remote Monitoring.

Please don't hesitate to contact us at Info@Valarm.net if you've got any questions!

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Ever wanted to build your own affordable outdoor pagoda or Industrial IoT sensor enclosure? This instructable teaches you how to make your own pagoda (a.k.a Stevenson screen or instrument shelter) where you can put a weather, air quality, or any other sensor. After you have everything configured then deploy your pagoda in the field to collect your data and perform remote environmental monitoring, data acquisition, fleet tracking, and more Industrial IoT applications. Plus you can make sparks with a dremel as shown in this video!

In order to do this DIY pagoda you should have these parts:
- Plates or pot trays or saucers [You can get as many of these as you like depending on how tall you want your pagoda to be. You can get these at a home and/or garden center like Home Depot]
- Hot glue and hot glue gun
- Dremel
- All Thread Rods (sized depending on how high you want your pagoda to stand)
- Drill with drill bits sized for All Thread Rods
- Plastic or vinyl tubing that fits around your all thread
- Bolts and wing nuts that fit your all thread
- A weather, air quality, other sensor, whatever you want to put inside your pagoda (e.g., Yoctopuce USB sensors connected to an app like Valarm to measure CO2, VOCs, light lumens in lux, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and/or other factors)

The pagoda built here is for housing a basic weather sensor, if you're using your pagoda to measure and monitor air quality then pay close attention to which materials you use since a lot of brand new paint and plastic can give off volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for days or weeks.

Initial step: drill 3 holes in your trays to make a triangle to put your all thread rods. In this example green trays were bought and left green so that the pagoda could be discretely deployed in a shady tree, you may want different colors for your deployment location. If your pagoda is going to be in direct sun you can paint it white on the outside and black on the bottom halves of the trays (except for the bottom one since we want ground heat to be reflected).

Once you drill the holes you can use a dremel or any other tool to remove the center portion of the trays (except two plates for the top and one for the bottom of the pagoda to make sure the sensor inside is protected). If the edges of the trays look like they might hold water you can cut holes in the edges to encourage liquid drainage.

The example pagoda made in this Instructable was deployed in Los Angeles, California, as part of a collaborative research project between the Los Angeles Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, the Entomology Department at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, and the BioSCAN biodiversity project.

The pagoda with a weather sensor (temperature, humidity, barometric pressure) inside is attached via USB cable to a phone using the Valarm app which monitors and uploads the environmental factors in real-time to the Valarm Tools website via Wi-Fi and/or 3G/4G cell networks.

As seen in the photo, this green pagoda was placed in a fig tree in a garden right by a bee hotel in order to assess local leafcutter bee nest cell construction and biodiversity. Now you're ready to remotely monitor water, air, and anything else!