Wireless meteorological station with Arduino UNO, weather shield, xbee and Raspberry pi
My meteo station is based on the Sparkfun weather shield. The station consists of two parts; the external and the internal unit. The external unit is located on the roof-top of the building collecting, processing and transmitting the data while the internal unit is in the house, logging and presenting the data.
The external unit consists of the below parts:
- Arduino UNO
- weather shield
- xbee module
- weather meters
The Arduino with the weather shield and the xbee module are installed into a wooden box which accomodates the battery, the charger and the solar panel.
The collected data are
- temperature
- humidity
- barometric pressure
- wind speed
- wind direction
- wind gust
- wind gust direction
- rainfall daily
Even though the weather shield has temperature and humidity sensors on board, they are measured by an DHT22 temperature-humidity sensor installed into a radiation shield. The Arduino with the weather shield could not be exposed to the ambient conditions because the humidity can condensate on their surfaces damaging them. Furthermore, a bigger radiation shield should be used. So it was prefered to use a remote sensor (DHT22). The weather shield sensors are not disabled; they are used to measure the conditions into the wooden box, activating a fan if the temperature into the box exceeds a specified limit. The consumption of the station is ~35 mA. The capacity of the battery is 7.2 Ah giving an “endless” autonomy to the station. The solar paned is 10 Wp rated. Acoording to the calculations the power supply system is OVER sized giving the chance to use an aspiration fan for the radiation shield.
The internal unit constists of a Raspberry Pi, an xbee module and an LCD display. It collects the data and stores them in a usb flash disk. Also checks if the data are regularly updated and gives an alarm if no data are received for more than 2 minutes.