disquisitioner / weather-station

A variety of increasingly capable home weather station systems that have evolved over many years of exploration.

Weather Station

This is my second major Arduino project, though the first one to get put into everyday use. For years my wife and I had thought about buying and installing a home weather station but somehow never got around to doing it. It didn't take me long to realize I could easily build my own and have a lot more fun in the process. An Arduino manages several weather-related sensors, reading and processing their data to generate a set of readings which can be displayed directly and also relayed to a home computer (or similar device) for logging, daily report generation, etc.

Once you have an Arduino actively reading from and managing a few sensors you can expand the system in an almost infinite number of ways. You can add more sensors, you can incorporate more sophisticated displays, you can enhance connectivity through on-board networking or wireless interfaces, you can build more functionality into upstream systems fed by the Arduino, you can go for battery-powered portability, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

So the collection of projects here represents a variety of ways I've explored evolving the basic weather station concept.

NOTE: If you're just after the latest version of my home weather station software then you're looking for the 'Home Weather Station - Teensy' project included here and described below.

Content

LCD Weather Station (Project)

My first weather station effort using a few simple sensors and a 16x2 LCD display. It has all the key elements, though, including averaging sensor readings over a configurable interval and reporting them via the serial port for processing by some upstream system -- initially a PC that could log the data to non-volatile storage and also upload them to web services.

OLED Weather Station (Project)

Adding a pixel-addresable OLED display allowed greater flexibility in showing current sensor readings and provided a more "professional" user interface. It also required building my own fonts, and motivated me to implement multiple screens that could be sequenced through to offer a variety of looks ranging from easily readable at a distance and also diagnostic for monitoring sensor data in real-time. This version worked well enough that I installed it for my family and it became a reliable resource for us all in monitoring weather conditions at home.

OLED Weather Station Plus (Project)

Once I had a basic home weather station in operation I naturally wanted to expand it. The first system only measured outdoor temperature, indoor temperature, and barometric presure. I wanted to add rainfall measurement along with wind speed and direction and found a set of sensors at Sparkfun that were perfectly suited for that purpose. That turned into a more interesting effort that I had expected as those sensors operated very differently -- the rain gauge and anemometer as switches that needed to be handled via interrupts and the wind vane as a variable resistor network.

Home Weather Station (Project)

The next step in the evolution of my home weather station project was to design a customer printed circuit board (PCB) and transition away from the breadboard approach I'd been using for all the electronics components and sensor connections. As I was gearing up to do that I learned that the BMP085 sensor I had been using for indoor temperature and barometric pressure had been retired in favor of a newer version, the BMP180. So I ordered a new BMP180 and modified my weather station code to use it instead of the BMP085. Because I felt I was (finally) ready for a more complete project I boldy chose the name 'Home Weather Station' for this version.

Home Weather Station - Teensy (Project) -- LATEST VERSION

Alas, with all the changes leading up to this as my (finally) complete home weather station, I discovered that the code I'd written for the Arduino had grown to the point that it no longer fit comfortably within the memory limitations of an Arduino Uno. Luckily I discovered Teensyduino, an Arduino-compatible system build on a more powerful processor with much greater memory, stack space, and performance. Teensy made other things possible, e.g. all digital pins on Teensy are interrupt enabled so I could change how I used those pins to simplify the code. Going forward I plan to keep evolving this code path, at least as the basis for use with my custom PCB.

WX Data Simulator (Project)

In building other systems to receive data from the weather station (such as my Weather Uplink project) I quickly realized it was easier if I could configure an Arduino to simulate the full weather station and report synthetic sensor data in the proper format. That's what this Arduino script does. It does not require any sensors or display, instead just generating reasonable random weather data and sending it out via the serial port in the proper format.

Weather Station PCB (Collection)

With the updated and expanded 'Home Weather Station' code up and running I was at last ready to design my own custom printed circuit board. Happily I discovered a class via Meetup.com and signed up to learn circuit board design, then used that knowledge to layout my board and send it to OSH Park to be fabricated. Because I couldn't be certain my first ever PCB design would get everything right I decided I needed a set of Arduino projects to help me incrementally test assembly of the circuit board using relevant subsets/variation of my full Home Weather Station software. This folder contains all the PCB test programs I wrote to qualify my custom PCB and get it on-line as part of my weather station.