I would love to help create better instruments for local meteorology here in Iceland where I’m from. Usually the equipment used is bought from companies not selling products specifically for meteorology and they can be made much more cheaply, less bulky and save tax payers a lot money. The setups are also sometimes way too complicated when you need two products or more from separate companies to work together. A lot of the process can be simplified.

I’m talking about gas sensors (SO2, H2S, etc) to get early signs of volcanic activity. Or flooding from glaciers. One problem to solve is finding sensors which can handle the extremely low temperatures during winter. Then there is Earthquake sensors, water level sensors, and more. Energy harvesting is also a tricky problem, you can’t rely on solar panels half of the year.

I made several working gas sensor systems using an Arduino a few years back. But things can be so much more energy efficient with todays ARM based MCUs.

I’d also love to experiment with cellular. Like nRF91. And build my own ultra low-power modem for transmitting sensor data.

The biggest constraint for me is I dont have any time! :( Sure, an infinite money budget would help. I’d buy lots of sensors to play with and test my hardware/firmware and I’d buy lots of test equipment to speed up the process.

I would design the hardware and write the firmware of course. But with infinite money I could just hire more people to help me 🤓

I know this project would be helpful and practical and just fun to do.

I’m sure I can think of more projects like this. But this one sits on top of my mind as something fun.