Erik Almaguer graduated from Eastern Washington University in 2020 with a major in Computer Science. He was selected as an EWU McNair Scholar in March of 2018 and completed his 2018 summer research A Novel Approach Towards Visualizing Weather Data on the Web with faculty mentor Dr. Shamima Yasmin.
2018 McNair Faculty Research Mentor: Dr. Shamima Yasmin - Computer Science
Research Title: A Novel Approach Towards Visualizing Weather Data on the Web
Abstract: The Alternative Energy Engineering Club (AEEC) at Eastern Washington University (EWU) had plans to construct a wind turbine and needed to remotely monitor its different states. With tools (e.g, Raspberry Pi 3, Arduino, and weathers sensors) provided by AEEC, a system has been built to access and visualize weather data in real-time. This system hosts a website for the visualization of current and past weather data using graphs and real-time 3D graphics. During this research, the pipeline from sensors to users has been developed; the system has been moved into its testing phase. Right now, visualization of the data is being explored. This research is an example of a software application developed in collaboration with mechanical and electrical engineers, to better understand useful approaches of data visualization for real world applications. The goal of this research is to provide the AEEC with custom tailored software to suit their needs. Building such a weather monitoring system from scratch will make the application portable, adaptable, and scalable for any use case. 2D and 3D visualizations of the data will be included to allow the user to readily examine the current condition of the wind turbine by displaying the most relevant information. This research work on weather data visualization can be easily extended for any real-time sensor data visualizations.
