Chris Nafis Projects

When I'm not working at GE Global Research, I enjoy my family, boating, skiing, biking, working on our 1833 house, and a ton of other things!

Weatherstations for Schools

I have been working with the GE Volunteers organization to build weatherstations for local schools. The hope is to get kids interested in science.

Rabbit Processor based 1-Wire Weather station

Here's a Rabbit Semiconductor Processor based weatherstation that uses 1-wire sensors ( version 1, version 2). It displays the weather information locally on an LCD display and posts it's weather data to the WeatherUnderground and CWOP.

Siteplayer based weathervane

Here's a NetMedia Siteplayer ethernet web server based Weathervane.

Measuring Snowfall and snow depth

I'm interested in low-cost sensors that automatically measure snowfall or snow depth. I've developed several prototypes:

Water Level Detector

Here's a 1-wire IR sensor to measure water level

Solar Radiation Sensor

Here's a 1-wire solar radiation sensor based on the DS2438.

Lightning Strike Detection

Lightning detectors are available from Boltek. Lightning strike counters kits are available from Hobby Boards. Unfortunately the Boltek range estimations are not that good. I'm interested in combining the bearing information from different locations to better locate the strike locations. I've put together several applications to help display the strike locations. Astrogenic systems (makers of NexStorm) has now come out with an application called Strikestar that combines data from Boltek NexStorm users and triangulates lightning strike locations.

3D Scanners

I'm interested in building low-cost 3D scanners that can make a digital model of a real objects.