Project – Weather Station

As we are all a bit obsessed with data these days, check out this project by our member Jeffrey Roe. A weather station to capture up local conditions. The kit is from dfrobot.com. It comes with an anemometer, wind vane, rain bucket and temperature and humidity sensor.

The board comes with a controller that reads the sensors and outputs the data over serial. A code sample for reading this data was available on the seller’s website. To get the data to the internet a NodeMCU was used but as this board was 3.3v TTL logic and the weather controller was 5V a logic shifter was used to help out.

OpensenseMap provides a handy service and API for logging different types of sensors. The unit uploads data every minute of the current weather conditions. The HTTP post sample was modified to combined with the sensor sample to make it easy to get the data uploading.

Check out the photos of the install on our gallery.

Once the station was up and running, it was sending lots of odd data with humidity values over 100% and rain values in the 10,000 mm in the last hour. A classic problem revealed itself. Noise on the serial lined between the two microcontrollers introduced bad values from the sensors. A simple filter to drop data if it was detected.

Other features were added to the code like OTA updates and a local webserver to view the status and data on the device.

To view the live data visit https://opensensemap.org/explore/5f40f9d5214b72001c4e2fb9