Wind and Rain sensor kit newly arrived from SparkFun Electronics to upgrade an Arduino Weather Station project.
Also pictured are earlier DIY prototypes – a childrens bee wind spinner with hall effect sensor to count rotations, an anemometer made from recycled plastic packaging utilising a IR Led optical rotary encoder and a wind vane with eight fixed directional magnetic switches.
( more here: http://www.steveio.com/2020/07/21/weather-station-wind-vane-history-science/ and http://www.steveio.com/2020/07/21/weather-vane-hall-sensor-magnetic-rotary-encoder/ ).
( Code for these projects can be found on GitHib. )
Weather station projects are a popular accessible introduction to microelectronics; a microcontroller and sensors can be found at low cost, modular hardware design results in easy assembly and open software platforms like Arduino IDE streamline packaging and deployment of code to devices.
Analysing real time or historical time series data, from weather sensors is a lot of fun. Frameworks like R Project for Math Stats: https://www.r-project.org/ ) and Python, Pandas, Numpy & Mathplotlib provide implementations of most alogirithms and convenient data structures for importing & manipulating data.
Techniques and methods are transferable and can be applied to other domains or ontologies – finanicial, accounting data for example.
SparkFun offer an OEM Wind & Rain sensor kit manufactured by Shenzen Fine Offset Electronics, China.
With advent of 3d modelling & printing it is also feasible for an enthusiast to design and fabricate via a 3d printer custom sensor components, perhaps using template models downloaded from repos like ThingiVerse.
In competition marine OpenWind are defining what smart network connected sensors can achieve utilising Bluetooth LE to make near real time wind data available on smartphone.
Ideal for enthusiast or educator SparkFun Weather kit comes wihout circuitry, microcontroller or software. An add-on PCB designed for use with Arduino / ESP32 can be purchased or Datasheet Technical Specs provide reference sensor circuit designs, not significantly complex due to use of magnetic reed switch and variable resistance technology.
Traditionally 433MHz RF has been used for base station to transmitter devices. A popular project is to use Arduino, a cheap 433Mhz receiver and a library to read data from a commercial weather station designed for use with manufacturers display, enabling this data to be provisioned to the cloud.
For data transmission non GPRS (cellular) options include Bluetooth LE (range ~100 metres) or LoRa (Long Range Low Power Network – range between 300 – 10km depending on antenae) offering cableless wireless connectivity allowing remote sensor situation with no associated network costs.
At data layer WebSockets and MQTT for IOT devices are challenging serial protocols as defacto lightweight, reliable & easy to implement transport relays.
Apart from range and connectivity goals of low power consumption for efficient and long battery running time combined with solar charging enable devices to run standalone for long periods.
Weather Stations have applications beyond meteorology in smart agriculture, industrial, safety monitoring and for wind or wave based leisure pursuits.
More generally Internet of things wireless networked smart sensor platforms can be used for many purposes and combined with AI and Machine Learning algorithms useful insight and patterns within data can be analysed, classified and predicted.
Personally, I really enjoyed SparkFun Arduino LilyPad e-textile, smart fabrics and conductive thread kit, so looking forward to now spinning up the Weather Station sensors!
