About building the Remote Snow Sensor - This was an extremely challenging project I undertook to help a friend who plows snow. I am grateful I was able to build something that met his needs, and has been in use every Winter for over 10 years. The construction requires somewhat advanced fabrication and electronic assembly skill. Both the transmitter and receiver use Microchip PIC16F84AP microcontrollers using code written in Microchip assembly. The code is very challenging, particularly the serial data encoding and decoding. There are 3 circuit boards that were designed using Cadsoft Computer Eagle 4.0 - a transmitter board, receiver board, and receiver display board. I tested various commercial RF transmitter and receiver boards, and eventually found a RF Tx/Rx combination from Reynolds Electronics that worked well. The other challenging part of the project is linearizing and calibrating the Sharp GP2D02 IR Range sensor. This basically involves using the transmitter and receiver to record the raw sensor out every 10mm throughout its entire range. The data is manually transferred to a spreadsheet that does the linearization calculations. From this data, a subset is chosen to create a lookup table for the receiver. This is quite a bit of complication added to the project because the PIC16F84AP does not support floating point operations. The IR sensor is still available from secondary sources, but there is an analog output version of the sensor that would probably work as well. With the microcontroller boards commercially available, the project could be implemented more quickly and perhaps easier than the approach I took in 2000. So why am I offering to publish the project now? Actually for no better reason than I was about to throw out the development computer, development tools, documentation, and prototypes, but I thought if someone was really interested in this project, I would be happy to share the hard won details and experience. And if no one is interested in tackling a project of this difficultly, oh well, I enjoyed the challenge, and its made my friend happy that he can sleep at night.