[nuumio] has been hard at work building a Tweeting weather station, which he recently got up and running. The weather station is built from three major components, a Linux PC for data storage and Tweeting, a main weather sensor unit, and a remote unit.
The remote unit sits outside and includes includes both a pressure and humidity/temperature sensor. The sensors are polled every 20 seconds, reporting the data back to the main unit via a 434 MHz RF transceiver. The remote sensor also records the ambient light level and the remaining battery voltage, sending that data to the main unit for good measure.
The main unit sits inside his house and records the same temperature and humidity data as the external unit. The main unit adds its data to the packets sent by the remote unit and transmits them to the PC via USB. The PC calculates the minimum and maximum temperatures for the last 12-hour and 24 -hour periods before sending that data back to the main unit to be displayed on its LCD panel. Every 10 minutes, the computer also posts the weather data on Twitter.
If you are looking to build your own weather station, [nuumio] has provided all of the source code for his project on his web page. However, he does admit that he was too lazy to draw up a schematic, so you are on your own in that department.
Why does he have a pressure sensor inside and outside?
AFAIK, only one is needed.
Well, after reading the project page, he really has only the pressure sensor outside.
Hackaday, please correct your “The main unit sits inside his house and records the same pressure, temperature, and humidity data as the external unit”.
I think they mean that it is recording the data sent to it from outside…
26% RH?! Christ, must be like living in a desert!
James: 20-40% RH is quite typical for a Finnish block of flats in winter (50-60% RH in summer). You’ll get used to it pretty fast, although the mucosae will easily become irritated and dry.
@James
Yes, it is a bit low but this is what you get when it is cold outside and you want to have 22 C inside (it is just physics). European homes (usually) do not have any humidity control and people just get used to it.
Still some people do add some moisture into the rooms by putting wet towels over the radiators.
Though adding additional humidity does create another problems because when walls are not properly insulated then the humidity in the air will condense into the walls and will create mold (specially in the corners).
sell this to the MET office in the UK, get them to give them to people around the UK so met has loads more data, especially nice with twitter as you could hashtag postcode areas and anyone could look up really fresh weather data on twitter.
he should post his data on Pachube instead of twitter , thus it could be easily shared.
agreed – why not send the data to pachube? i really don’t get the point of sending data to twitter, which makes it really hard for anyone to make sense of it… you have to read tweets rather than graphs? can’t get the data in different formats? there are already weather stations on pachube, join the crowd!
Postgres >>> MySQL. Good choice. Your friend doesn’t know what he’s talking about :P
Nice build. I’ve been considering something similar myself. But, well, how many times have we all said that…
Nice idea. Has its uses.