After a busy few months I have a bit of time on my hands with the demise of a commitment at Push Hockey magazine. (Hint anyone need an electronics-aware journalist, just ask!). I have had in mind, for a few months, a project to get a weather station up and running at my parents-in-laws' farm. There are some good examples of Maplin USB weather stations connected to Pis and producing excellent results. However, I really fancied something more standalone that would give me a chance to do some coding and maybe combine a few units I already have. My general approach to these things is to scope out the various sections of the project to give me confidence I can find working solutions - without necessarily solving them initially - then just get the project working one stage at a time. The basic idea is to have the Ardunio at the weather station head collecting the data from the instruments with some sort of wireless link to the Pi which would handle display of data and uploading to the internet. I have a Cisco XinoRF Arduino module kickig around http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/raswik/ and a Slice of Radio shield for the Pi end too, so these are my starting point. I have messed around a little using LLAP with these, making me fairly confident I can move the data to the Pi, therefore my major initial concern is how to get the weather end working. After much scouting around for options in terms of instrumentation, I came across this excellent project from Sparkfun. Many of the components in that project are available in the UK. And the code looks like a good starting point to save some of the hard-work out of reading the sensors. There is an example of a solar power implementation too, which also gave me a few ideas. My initial plan looks like this. Now it's time to start shopping.  |
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