Arduino UNO weather station?

Software Internet of Things (IoT)
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Hi all, I have been running W.D. now for some 10 or 12 years, I cannot remember exactly. Last year my Oregon Scientific WMR ?? finally gave up working. due to it’s age, and finding myself retired from work, therefore having time on my hands if not money, I decided to learn a new skill. I have always been fascinated by Electronics & PC’s (I am a Time served Mechanic), a friend of mine introduced me to ARDUINO, after many months of learning, and experimenting, I finally put together a Weather Station, using an ARDUINO UNO, powered by battery.

My weather station monitors, Temperature, Humidity, UV, Air Pressure and Lux levels, I live very close to tall trees, and sometimes it feels like I am in a whirlpool, so I decided not to measure Wind Speed etc; or Precipitation, as I feel the results would not be very accurate, this is all viewed on a LCD display.

Sorry for a long introduction, this is what I would like to do this winter. I would like to link my ARDUINO to my PC, so that i can download and save data in my WEATHER DISPLAY software, but I need help, are there any weather watches out there who have similar set ups?? My first thoughts are to use NRF24L01 modules to Transmit & Receive data, this i think I can do reasonably easily, but i need help with the rest, how, and with what do I connect the Arduino to the Internet or PC.

Can anyone help me or point me in the right direction, being on a pension I cannot afford to make large mistakes, plus it would be nice to communicate with someone who has already been down this route.

Many thanks for reading this post

Ray

2

Hi Ray

Well done for making your station. I’m sure you’ve learned a lot in the process.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve not done what you’ve done (yet) and don’t have any knowledge of the NRF24L01 other than what I’ve read online in the last 10 minutes so don’t take what I say as absolutely correct! The NRF24L01 looks interesting but I’m not sure it’s the best solution for what you want to do. It looks like a good way to connect multiple IOT/Ardiuno devices together into a mini IOT network. It’s SPI based which means it’s suited to IOT where devices often have that interface onboard. Unfortunately PCs don’t have SPI interfaces so to get the data out of the NRF24L01 you’d need to add a USB to SPI interface adapter which seem to be about £15-20 in the UK (although I don’t know if they’re suitable for what you want to do). You’d then need to write some code on the PC to setup/read the USB/SPI interface and then interpret the data being received by the PC NRF24L01 from your station NRF24L01.

An alternative which might be a little easier to handle could be an ESP8266 or ESP32 board. These boards have WiFi and SPI onboard so you could connect your station over WiFi. Your station could connect to your WiFi network and it woudl then have an IP address. You could then write some code on the PC using , for example, the Telnet protocol. The PC sends ‘DATA’ to the station IP address. When the station sees ‘DATA’ arrive from the WiFi SPI connection it would assemble a data packet, e.g. “T=21.4,H=76.2,P=1004.2” and send that back in response. The PC can then do whatever it likes with the data, e.g. format it for input to WD and then let WD get on with handling the rest of the process for using the data. Alternatively you could have a program on the PC sitting watching for data from the station and have the station send data to the PC every 30 seconds or whatever frequency you would like.

The advantage of this solution is that it’s using existing standards (WiFi/Telnet/IP addressing) and you only need one device to create the interface because your station would connect to your existing router and therefore be accessible immediately to all other devices on your network. One disadvantage is that the ESP8266/ESP32 boards consume more power when transmitting. I think the NRF24L01 consumes about 12mA during transmit and the ESP32/ESP8266 consumes about 70mA. Transmit time it likely to be limited so you’d have to consider how much this would affect your battery supply.

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Hi Chris

Many thanks for the info, looks like I have some reading to do.

Regards

Ray

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Hi!
I apologize for jumping in here, but I am new to the technological side of weather watching. I wanted to add weather to my website and was looking for the right API. I came across the term “Internet of Things” on a website called climacell.co and they claim it is better than other APIs due to the sheer amount of data collection points. Does that make a really make a difference? Or shall I just stick to one of the open source APIs like Openweathermap?

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Hi. Internet of Things is a concept rather than a specific API or piece of hardware/software. It refers to many bits of technology that are small discrete items rather than big general purpose computer, e.g. a temperature + humidity sensor that has a built in web site that you can put in your greenhouse and look at its web site to find out how pleasant it is for your plants would be IoT.

Choose an API is more down to what you want to achieve, e.g.do you want your own weather station or do you want to use data from elsewhere on the internet to populate your web site?