Wireless sensor network for characterizing the effectiveness of a fan ventilated telescope enclosure

Telescope enclosures are ventilated for achieving temperature homogeneity with respect to the outside temperature. To estimate the amount and duration of wind flushing it is necessary to monitor the thermal gradient along the cooling path. A network of scalable temperature sensor boards over wireless XBEE is developed for deploying at various locations to understand the effect of ventilation fans and the wind flow inside the building. An XBEE coordinator collects the data from the endpoint sensor nodes and sends to an interfacing PC over a virtual serial port. Customized sensor boards are developed using PIC microcontrollers and the interfacing software is developed in Visual C++ which utilizes the Matlab runtime engine for plotting. The system is tested on a scaled down laboratory setup and timing, consistency and performance of the system are verified.