★ N.I.C. ★
Design-stage concept — nothing built. The figures are verified against the parts' sheets and the parts before a board is made.
Chinook is Palatine's air-composition set, not a board and not a unit. Every air sensor worth
fitting is a bought RS-485 ModBus unit on a Palatine arm, a slave at the address written into it
like every bought sensor's (../HARDWARE.md, The Modbus address map), read by Palatine like its
other sensors (../, ../../core/blocks/modbus.md). Nothing is manufactured, nothing is enrolled
on the NodBus, and nothing is added to the protocol.
Palatine measures the weather, Chinook what the air is made of. Temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, radiation, UV, precipitation, snow, soil and leaf wetness are Palatine's. What is left is air chemistry and particulates — the quantities a site fits for its own reason, in its own setting, on its own budget.
A station measures no air chemistry unless a site asks for it, and the reason is money. Every air-chemistry unit is a consumable or a service item:
| class | what wears | life |
|---|---|---|
| electrochemical cell — CO, NO₂, O₃, SO₂, H₂S, NH₃ | the cell, which consumes its target gas | ½–2 years |
| MOX — a VOC or NOx index | the heated element drifts; the index re-baselines, the absolute never holds | 1–2 years of usable index |
| laser particle counter — PM | a fan, and an open optical chamber that fouls with the dust it counts, condenses in fog and takes insects | a season between cleanings outdoors |
| NDIR — CO₂, CH₄ | nothing: a sealed optical path, no moving part | fitted and left |
One unit is about a hundred dollars and a couple of years; five on a station are a few hundred
dollars a year and a visit; a hundred stations are a standing budget and a maintenance round — for
quantities that in open country mostly measure the country. So the base carries none of it. A
site that wants air chemistry buys the units, budgets their replacement and cleaning, and hangs
them on an arm; SENSORS.md says what to buy by setting and what each must meet.
- A Palatine arm: the arm's 12 V (a bought part takes 10–30 V), one rate per arm, 9 600 or 19 200, and a roster entry with the unit's register run; a bought unit is verified by answering.
- The station clock on every reading, so a CO rise sits on the same second as the strike that lit it where Tesla is fitted.
- Gating per unit at the arm's power board between reads, where the part tolerates it — a heated unit or a fan-and-optics unit may not.
- Nothing else: no correction on the node, no air board, no heated chamber in the base.
PALATINE ──a ModBus arm──▶ bought RS-485 ModBus units, each at its written address:
particulates · CO · CH₄ · NO₂ · O₃ · SO₂ · H₂S · NH₃ · CO₂ · VOC — per site, none in the base
| file | contents |
|---|---|
SENSORS.md |
what to buy by setting, and what an air unit must meet — the particle counter, the chemistry classes, temperature, humidity |
CONSTRUCTION.md |
the housing — the chimney, the mesh and the baffle, the counter's inlet, where it stands, the cold-climate build |
WHY.md |
the graveyard |
Hardware: CERN-OHL-P v2 (../../LICENSE-HW) · Software: MIT (../../LICENSE) — Copyright (c) 2026 NIC — Native Intellect Community