1st Arduino-based project completed: A weather station!

I finished my first complete Arduino project: a weather station data logger driven by an Arduino Pro Mini microprocessor! The station includes a tipping bucket rain gauge, anemometer (wind speed), humidity/barometric pressure/temperature sensor, and solar panel to recharge the li-poly battery. The station will be installed at my research site in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky in October, along with several other monitoring stations: a base station to collect and send data to the internet using a cellular modem, monitoring well with water level sensor (i.e., groundwater depth) and water chemistry sensors, and a water quality monitoring station at the flume to measure water chemistry and streamflow. Ultimately there will be 9 monitoring stations, all of which will be linked together in a wireless sensor network. Data will be uploaded every 5 minutes and live-streamed to a graphical dashboard. The live data stream will look similar to the data feed from the environmental monitoring station that we installed on campus as part of Watershed UGA. The Watershed UGA system was developed by one of my advisors, John Dowd.

The weather station includes (above, starting clockwise from the top) a tipping bucket rain gauge, anemometer (wind speed), and humidity/barometric pressure/temperature sensor (inside small, waterproof enclosure shown without the lid).

The data logger is built on an Arduino microprocessor. For security purposes, we wanted to make the system small so we used the Arduino Pro Mini, one of their smallest microprocessors (left; the small rectangular circuit board near the bottom with green and white wires protruding). The voltage meter (small green display attached to the lid) displays 3.3V power-ing the system. During the day, the system is powered by a 6W solar panel which also recharges the 3400 mA li-poly battery. The rechargeable battery powers the system at night.

Data is saved on a microSD card (as a backup in case of system failure), and transmitted to the base station using an XBee Pro 900 GHz radio (left, circuit board attached to the antenna at the bottom of the waterproof enclosure.

The barometric pressure/humidity/ temperature sensor (Bosche BME280) is protected inside a waterproof enclosure to protect it from the elements (left, internal view; the enclosure has a lid but I wanted to show the sensor inside). A small hole the size of a pin allows the sensor to equilibrate with the atmosphere.

The sensor collects data which is transmitted back to the data logger using I2C (a digital communication protocol) via a waterproof 4-wire connector.

As you can see (right), the completed data

logger is quite compact. The enclosure will be mounted in the open on a pole, along with the rain gauge, barometric pressure sensor, anemometer, and solar panel much as you see in the photo below.

#Arduino #WeatherStation #OpenSource