LAMSkyCam: A Low-cost and Miniature Ground-based Sky Camera
Description
Ground-based sky imagers (GSIs) are increasingly becoming popular amongst the remote sensing analysts. This is because such imagers offer fantastic alternatives to satellite measurements for the purpose of earth observations. In this paper, we propose an extremely low-cost and miniature ground-based sky camera for atmospheric study. Built using 3D printed components and off-the-shelf components, our sky camera is lightweight and robust for use in diverse climatic conditions. With a 63◦ field of view angle, the camera captures high resolution sky/cloud images for both day and night times at 5 minute intervals. The camera is designed to be be mounted on a pole-like architecture and with its compact form, it can be installed at any location without requiring any change in the existing infrastructure. For remote areas, the camera has also a local backup facility from which data can be easily accessed manually. We have open-sourced the hardware design of our sky camera, and therefore researchers can easily manufacture and deploy these cameras for their respective use cases. The 3D printed files are provided as a part of this repository in the form of both STEP (CAD) and STL files. A 2D drawing to cut the insulating sheet is also provided in PDF format. The parts are numbered as per the corresponding manuscript.