What is new about the MeteoWind IoT Pro Gen2 transmitter enclosure?

QUESTION: What does the new MeteoWind IoT Pro Gen2 transmitter bring to its users?

ANSWER: A completely redesigned, starship-shaped transmitter enclosure that protects better against the weather, installs faster and lasts longer in severe outdoor environments. Gen2 also brings updated internal electronics and firmware, while keeping the high-fidelity 4 Hz wind measurement MeteoWind is known for.

MeteoWind IoT Pro smart city wind sensor new Gen 2 transmitter box overlooking Barcelona city skyline with Torres Glorias in the background.

The Gen2 transmitter integrates cable sealing, antenna protection and solar-panel mounting into one enclosure, protected from weather and UV radiation for a long life in the most extreme environments. It carries Jan Barani's signature aerospace-inspired design lines: unconventional, functional and good-looking, unlike the usual rectangular electronics enclosure boxes.

The goal is simple: fewer exposed parts, fewer installation steps and better protection from rain, snow, ice, UV radiation and physical damage.

MeteoWind IoT Pro Gen2 all-weather transmitter enclosure

The new starship-shaped enclosure brings these improvements:

• IP68 protection. Fully sealed, the enclosure is designed for IP68 in marine environments. With the pressure-equalizing breather valve installed in terrestrial installations, it is IP67W, designed for the most extreme weather.
• Cable entries for round and flat cables. The new cable entries also seal flat sensor cables, which conventional glands handle poorly.
• No gland nut to forget. No more wasted time and frustration after forgetting to slide the cable through the gland nut before wiring, and then having to rewire every lead.
• No sealing plug to forget. Unused cable ports come pre-sealed, so equipment can no longer fail from water getting in through an entry where a technician forgot the plug.
• Up to 50% faster sensor cabling. Fewer loose parts and easier cable insertion cut the time needed to connect sensors in the field.

Cable entries are protected from rain, snow and ice

On a conventional outdoor electronics box, the cable glands face wind-driven precipitation directly. On the Gen2 transmitter, the cable entries are recessed under a skirt underneath the enclosure, using gravity to their advantage in keeping water out when technicians forget to tighten a seal. This shields the cable entries from:

• wind-driven rain
• wind-driven water ingress
• wet snow
• freezing rain
• ice buildup
• direct sunlight

Room to keep the antenna hidden inside

External antennas are among the most vulnerable parts of outdoor wireless equipment. They get damaged during:

• transport
• installation
• maintenance
• icing
• severe wind
• impacts from falling or wind-blown objects

The Gen2 enclosure has enough internal volume for the antennas used in BARANI wireless sensors and devices. The antenna stays fully protected inside instead of sticking out into the weather.

Integrated solar-panel mounting

The enclosure has built-in mounting slots for solar panels. The panels mount at an incline instead of lying flat on top of the box, which helps them:

• shed snow
• drain rainwater instead of holding standing water
• get washed clean by rain

Up to three solar panels can be mounted 120° apart. This helps maximize early-morning solar power, and it matters in the Arctic, where the sun can travel more than 300° of azimuth between sunrise and sunset.

The inclined mounting is particularly useful for unattended stations running through winter and for sites with large bird populations.

Why does the Gen2 transmitter look like a starship?

Aerospace engineering, right down to the electronics enclosure.

The shape is not just cosmetic. It carries design lines from the designer's aerospace background. Instead of the typical rectangular electronics enclosure, the Gen2 transmitter uses a streamlined, tapered housing inspired by spacecraft nose-cone geometry.

The shape is protected by design patents for electronics enclosures in many countries worldwide.

Removing the flat horizontal surfaces, exposed corners and abrupt edges of conventional boxes was a priority. On a rectangular box, those are exactly the places where birds perch and where snow, ice, water and debris collect.

Paradoxically, the round outer shape is highly spacious inside for vertically positioned rectangular circuit boards (PCBs) and batteries, and it gives great finger access to make wiring quick and even enjoyable.

High UV resistance for permanent outdoor installation

The enclosure is made of high-grade outdoor ASA, in black or white. We chose ASA for its resistance to UV radiation and weathering, and for its high impact strength.

The enclosure is designed for 15+ years outdoors, from high solar-load equatorial sites to cold, snow-covered polar and high-altitude installations.

High mechanical and impact resistance

Weather instruments face much more than normal rain and wind. Hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons and severe storms hit outdoor equipment with hail, broken branches, wind-blown debris and ice, on top of the knocks it takes during transport and installation.

The Gen2 enclosure combines:

• thick-wall ASA construction
• rounded external geometry
• a thick stainless-steel mounting bracket
• recessed cable entries
• protected internal electronics and antenna

Designed for easier field installation

Weather stations often go on rooftops, towers, poles and remote sites, where every extra installation step matters. The Gen2 enclosure needs fewer cable-gland parts and sealing components. In practice, an installer:

1. mounts the transmitter base and its stainless-steel bracket with one or two stainless-steel hose clamps or U-bolts,
2. with the transmitter base now in a comfortable position, inserts the sensor cables (no need to worry about forgetting or losing the cable-gland nuts) and hand-tightens the glands to keep the cables in place without needing a third hand,
3. connects the starship-shaped enclosure's solar-panel connector to the PCB and secures the enclosure onto the base with three screws.

Two hands instead of three are now enough, and the installation is one-third simpler than that of the original rectangular box.

What changed compared with the previous MeteoWind IoT Pro?

Feature	Previous Gen1 transmitter	MeteoWind IoT Pro Gen2 (NEW)
Enclosure shape	Rectangular box	Streamlined starship shape
Environmental sealing	IP67-class wireless module	Up to IP68 sealed; IP67W with breather valve
Cable entries	Conventional cable glands	Integrated cable sealing
Flat-cable sealing	Limited by conventional glands (unsupported)	Supported
Gland nut over cable	Required	Not required
Plugs for unused entries	Normally required	Not required
Cable-entry exposure	Exposed	Recessed underneath the enclosure
Internal antenna	Compromised due to limited vertical space	Can be protected inside the enclosure
Solar-panel mounting	Top-mounted	Integrated inclined slots for up to 3 panels
Snow shedding	Limited by horizontal surfaces	Significantly improved by inclined, rounded geometry
Bird-perching surface	Flat surfaces available	Reduced horizontal perching area
Bird droppings (guano)	Flat surfaces highly susceptible to guano on the solar panel	Reduced perching and angled solar panels greatly reduce guano accumulation on the solar panels and promote self-cleaning by rain
Housing material	Supplier-proprietary, susceptible to yellowing	Outdoor UV-resistant, impact-resistant, automotive-grade ASA
Mounting	Conventional box bracket	Heavy stainless-steel bracket for mounting with one or two steel cable ties or U-bolts

Does the wind sensor itself change?

No. The redesign simplifies mounting and protects the electronics better. The measurement stays the same: high-fidelity wind data, measured 4 times per second.

High fidelity means the sensor keeps up with fast wind changes, as required for smart-city simulations. The MeteoWind IoT Pro Gen2 measures wind speed and direction together at 4 Hz, so every 3-second gust is calculated per WMO from 12 measurements in 3 seconds. Many low-power ultrasonic wind sensors save energy by measuring less often, some only once every few seconds, so short gusts can fall between their samples. In audio, a low sampling rate loses the sharp notes; in wind measurement, this low fidelity loses the wind gusts and thus skews averages.

The Gen2 datasheet specifies:

• wind-speed range from 0 to over 80 m/s
• starting wind speed of 0.2 m/s
• 1° wind-direction resolution
• 2° wind-direction accuracy
• 3-second and 1-second wind gusts reported simultaneously, from high-fidelity 4 Hz measurements
• solar charging with an internal lithium-ion battery that runs 4+ months without sun, enough to get through long winters
• operation from −45 °C to +80 °C

The Gen2 redesign improves everything around the measurement: environmental protection, mechanical strength and installation.

Why redesign something that already worked?

Outdoor reliability usually improves by removing weak points and simplifying where it matters, not by adding complexity. Every exposed antenna, cable-gland part, sealing plug, horizontal surface and external connection is one more place where years of weather and human intervention during servicing can eventually cause a failure. Gen2 removes as many of them as possible.

The result is a compact, better-looking transmitter, protected from the weather and built for long-term unattended installations.

New enclosure, same Hi-Fi wind data.

BARANI Open Sourced Kafka Streaming Manifests for IoT Data Infrastructure

BARANI meteo innovations open sourced kafka data streaming architecture

At BARANI, accurate environmental measurement does not stop at the sensor. Our weather stations and meteorological sensors generate data that must move reliably from the field into systems where it can be stored, transformed, analyzed, and acted on. That requires more than hardware. It requires dependable data infrastructure.  

Today, we are open sourcing part of that infrastructure: our Kafka Platform Manifests repository.

The repository contains Kubernetes manifests for a Kafka-centered streaming platform built around Strimzi and related services. It is designed as a single, structured open-source repository with component directories for Kafka, Schema Registry, ksqlDB, Kafka Bridge, Debezium Connect, and Camel Connect.  

This is not a release of our business-specific stream-processing logic. Instead, it shares the deployment patterns, component wiring, and infrastructure manifests that can help teams build and operate similar streaming data platforms. The repository defines Kafka topics, ingestion paths, supporting services, and example CDC and webhook ingestion components, while keeping production application logic outside the public repository.  

Why we are sharing this

IoT and environmental monitoring systems generate continuous streams of data. For us, this means handling telemetry, webhook payloads, device-related events, database changes, and downstream processing stages in a way that is repeatable and maintainable.

But this challenge is not unique to BARANI. Nonprofits, NGOs, environmental protection organizations, research teams, citizen-science projects, municipalities, smart city teams, and resilient city initiatives often face the same need: they collect valuable environmental data from sensors, field devices, databases, and partner systems, but need reliable infrastructure to move that data where it can be analyzed and acted on.

Kafka is well suited for this kind of architecture because it gives teams a durable event backbone. Kubernetes gives us a practical way to deploy, version, and reason about that infrastructure as manifests. Strimzi then provides the Kubernetes-native operator layer for Kafka.

By publishing these manifests, we want to make our approach easier to inspect, adapt, and improve. More importantly, we want to give mission-driven teams a realistic starting point for building Kafka-based ingestion and streaming systems on Kubernetes.

Our hope is that this work can support organizations focused on climate resilience, environmental monitoring, conservation, disaster preparedness, sustainable agriculture, air-quality monitoring, water-resource management, smart city infrastructure, resilient city planning, and other projects that help protect our planet and strengthen communities.

Reliable environmental decisions depend on reliable environmental data. So do smarter, more resilient cities. By sharing part of our infrastructure openly, we want to help more teams spend less time rebuilding the same platform foundations and more time using data to understand, protect, and restore the natural world while building communities that are better prepared for the future.

What is included

The repository is organized into component directories, each with its own README and deployment guidance.  

Kafka core

The kafka/ directory includes raw Kubernetes manifests for a Strimzi-managed Apache Kafka cluster running in KRaft mode, plus an optional Kafka UI deployment. It includes manifests for the Kafka node pool, Kafka custom resource, Kafka user, Kafka rebalance resource, and Kafka UI.  

Schema Registry

The schema-registry/ directory contains manifests for deploying Confluent Schema Registry alongside the Kafka cluster. It includes deployment configuration, an in-cluster service on port 8081, and optional ingress with TLS and basic authentication.  

ksqlDB

The ksqldb/ directory contains manifests for a ksqlDB server, helper CLI pod, persistent volume claim, service, and optional ingress. This provides a foundation for querying and working with streams once data is flowing through Kafka.  

Kafka Bridge

The kafka-bridge/ directory includes manifests for deploying Strimzi Kafka Bridge, allowing HTTP-based access patterns where they are useful. The included manifests define the Kafka Bridge custom resource and optional ingress with TLS and basic authentication.  

Debezium Connect

The debezium-connect/ directory contains manifests for a Strimzi Kafka Connect cluster with the Debezium PostgreSQL connector, example topic definitions, an example PostgreSQL source connector, and least-privilege RBAC for reading database credentials from a Kubernetes Secret.  

Camel Connect

The camel-connect/ directory contains manifests for a Strimzi Kafka Connect cluster using the Camel Netty HTTP connector to receive webhook requests and publish them to Kafka topics. It includes connector resources, topics, services, ingress, network policy, an optional webhook logger, and a PlantUML topology source.  

How the pieces fit together

The baseline deployment order starts with Kafka, then optional platform services such as Schema Registry, ksqlDB, and Kafka Bridge, followed by integration components such as Debezium Connect and Camel Connect.  

That structure reflects a practical streaming architecture:

First, the Kafka cluster provides the event backbone.

Next, services such as Schema Registry and ksqlDB support schema management, stream inspection, and query workflows.

Finally, ingestion components bring data into Kafka from external systems. Debezium Connect is used for PostgreSQL change data capture examples, while Camel Connect is used for webhook ingestion examples.  

What you should customize before using it

These manifests are intended as a reusable starting point, not a one-command production deployment. The root README documents shared assumptions such as the kafka namespace, the kafka-kraft cluster name, the Kafka bootstrap service, SCRAM Secret name, placeholder ingress hosts under example.com, and node labels that satisfy affinity rules.  

Before applying the manifests in your own environment, review and replace ingress hostnames, image registry placeholders, Secret names and contents, storage classes and storage sizes, node labels and affinity rules, replication factors, and sizing defaults.  

Security-sensitive values are intentionally not committed. The repository is designed to avoid live secrets, and referenced secrets must be created separately in your Kubernetes cluster. Some manifests use SASL_PLAINTEXT as an internal example, with guidance to switch to TLS or SASL_SSL when encryption in transit is required.  

Why this matters for IoT and environmental data

Reliable meteorological and IoT systems are built from multiple layers. Sensors must measure accurately. Connectivity must be dependable. Data pipelines must preserve events, handle scale, and support downstream analysis.

Open sourcing this repository gives developers, integrators, and infrastructure teams a clearer look at one way to build the data-streaming layer behind such systems. It also helps separate reusable infrastructure from proprietary product and domain logic.

That separation matters. The repository provides platform manifests, example wiring, validation commands, deployment order, and component-specific documentation. It does not expose the full production logic that transforms raw events into final domain outputs.  

License and contributions

The repository is released under the MIT License, with copyright attributed to BARANI DESIGN Technologies.  

We welcome careful review and useful contributions. The contributing guidance asks contributors to keep changes focused on manifests, examples, validation, and documentation; avoid committing secrets, internal hostnames, internal IPs, or private registry references; and validate changed YAML files before submitting.

Security-sensitive reports should not be opened as public issues. The security policy asks reporters to use private vulnerability reporting, a private security advisory, or another private maintainer channel before disclosing details publicly.  

Explore the repository

You can find the open-source Kafka streaming manifests on GitHub. Review the README, inspect the component directories, adapt the placeholders for your environment, and use the manifests as a starting point for your own Kafka-based IoT or streaming data platform.

Transparency Starts at the Sensor

Fix the instruments. Fix the forecast. Restore trust in climate warnings.

At MeteoExpo 2025 in Vienna, Jan Barani presented one of the most talked-about sessions at the Technology & Innovation Theatre — challenging the very foundations of today’s hydrometeorological measurement industry.

Our presentation, “Transparency Starts at the Sensor,” asks a simple but uncomfortable question:

How can we expect the world to trust our forecasts and climate warnings if the instruments we use to collect the data can’t be trusted themselves?

For too long, our industry has hidden behind laboratory certificates and “WMO-certified” marketing claims, while the quality of field measurements has quietly eroded.
From 3 °C temperature errors in official records to low-sampling ultrasonic anemometers that miss entire wind gusts, the credibility gap between data sheets and real-world truth is widening fastMET25_Technology & Innovation T…MET25_Technology & Innovation T….

Fix the Instruments, Not Just the Models

The presentation exposed how:

• “All-in-one” weather sensors combine incompatible measurements that disturb the very air they’re trying to measureMET25_Technology & Innovation T….

• Fan-aspirated radiation shields (FARS) distort measurement height and introduce thermal noise instead of removing itMET25_Technology & Innovation T….

• Low-power ultrasonics with 1 Hz or slower sampling rates can’t capture a 3-second gust and yet are still accepted in automatic weather stationsMET25_Technology & Innovation T….

• WMO’s own time-constant guidelines omit wind-speed context entirely, making the term meaningless in practical meteorologyMET25_Technology & Innovation T….

Rebuilding Credibility

If we want people to trust early warnings again, we must start with transparent instrumentation and open intercomparison testing.
The talk proposes a simple path forward:

• Proposal to implement Continuous WMO intercomparisons open to all manufacturers, funded by HMEI fees— not invite-only.

• Proposal to implement a wind-invariant constant and dimensionless response index to make temperature-sensor performance directly comparable across airspeeds.

• A call for “WMO certification through transparency”, where every sensor is verified in field conditions, not just in a chamber of a calibration laboratory.

Download the Full Presentation

The full slide deck — complete with illustrations, caricatures, and technical appendices — is available here:
👉 Download the PDF Presentation

About the Author

Jan Barani, founder and CEO of BARANI DESIGN Technologies, has spent over two decades challenging conventional thinking in meteorological instrumentation. His innovations — from the MeteoShield Pro to the MeteoHelix IoT Pro — have redefined field measurement accuracy across the globe.

At MeteoExpo 2025, his message was clear:

“Forecasts graded by the public on outcomes, not on calibration certificates, deserve better inputs. Let’s fix the instruments first.”

BARANI DESIGN Technologies is a manufacturer of professional weather stations