Summer Project – Weather Station

This summer’s project we (Isy Simpkins, Alys George, Andy Simpkins) intend to build a weather station. The project can be split into various sections and today we decided the scope of the project.

Initially we decided what we want to measure:

• Temperature
• Humidity
• Precipitation
• Wind speed and direction
• Light
• Air pressure

We’ve also decided that we shall have multiple sensors connected together reporting back to a central server. Sensors will be based around the Arduino ecosystem and the central server will be either a Raspberry Pi or a Beagle Bone Black. So we can get up and running quickly we will build our sensors and server using jump-wires and breadboard initially, then when we have a working prototype, we will make printed circuit boards and enclosures. Along the way, we will need to learn how to take measurements in a form that can be controlled and interpreted by the Arduinos (simple electronics), how to program the Arduinos (sketches in ‘C’), printed circuit board design (kicad), electronic assembly and test (soldering and fault-finding), mechanical design (CAD package to be decided), mechanical production (assembly into enclosures and 3D printing certain parts such as anemometer sails, optical encoder discs and wind vain). Finally, we will cover getting data from all our sensors into our central server (CAN bus or RS485?) storing the data (database?) and presenting historic and current weather information (active website with pretty graphs and charts). Obviously this is a lot of work so we will do it in small steps.