Software configured to a central server, saving expense and time

The Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy (PVPLC) preserves undeveloped land as open space for historical, educational, ecological, recreational and scenic purposes. The Conservancy works co-operatively with four cities: Rancho Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, and San Pedro (City of Los Angeles).

The climates in the preserved lands vary dramatically and are the study of much research, prompting PVPLC to install weather stations in each area. They dreamed of their data being used broadly, from scientists writing research papers to locals planning their day. However, this idea had one drawback – the data had to be collected manually. This proved to be a time consuming and costly chore – not exactly what they had envisioned. They needed to find a way to remotely collect and distribute this data for it to fulfil its purpose.

As PVPLC’s mission is preserving natural landscapes, any solution had to have as little environmental impact as possible. With this in mind ActionPoint took a visit to several sites and examined the weather stations. We took a close look at the existing software and discovered a way to add some clever new additions to achieve the required results – all without changing the station structure or hardware. We set the weather data to automatically upload to a central cloud server every 15 minutes. We then built a separate cloud server that allowed PVPLC to upload and share the weather data on their website.