Building a weather station isn’t too tall of an order for anyone getting into an electronics project. There are plenty of plans online, and you can even put your station on Weather Underground if it meets certain standards. These usually have access to a reliable source of power, though, and like any electronics project can get challenging quickly once it needs to work reliably in a remote location. The weather station from [Tegwyn☠Twmffat] has met this challenge though, and has been working reliably for three years now.
Getting that sort of reliability from any circuit that has to be powered by an unreliable source (solar, wind, etc.) and a battery is quite a challenge. Not only do you need to sort out the power management and make sure that you can get enough sun in the winter for your application, but you’ll need to do some extreme low power modifications to your circuitry as well. This weather station accomplishes all of that, helped by using LoRa for communication, and also comes complete with a separate hardware watchdog timer that can reboot the weather station if it loses power or hangs up for some reason.
If you’ve been looking for a weather station to build, this is a great place to start. [Tegwyn☠Twmffat] also goes through the assembly of the weather station, complete with a guy-wire-supported platform to mount it on. There are other weather stations out there too, if you need even more ideas about saving power in remote areas.
Just curious about the prices of the “professional” sensors.
I would really like to have a set up like this, but there are a number of tall trees on my property, so I just use temp/humidity/rain guage.
I also want to put a smooth shout out to Forrest Cook and his wx station open software at
http://www.solorb.com/software/
I’m not sure what the price of the pro sensors are, I got mine free from Vector instruments in return for some promotion / development. I have, however, seen them second hand on ebay for $50.
Trees are going to be a big problem, unless you can attach a pole to the tree to get above them. Even so, the action of the tree bending in high winds will give weird results. Can you set it up somewhere else, preferably within LoRa range or near a gateway?
In a former life doing this for research there are many out there with a large range in cost from cheap to research grade (e.g. Campbell Scientific). Perhaps research vendors to find something in your price range and focus on siting requirements for your location. Trees are definitely a challenge. IMHO siting with decent equipment will give you more accurate results than high-end equipment with poor site selection. There are several guides out there to help you here is one that is overly comprehensive (several other simpler ones) https://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/IMOP/SitingClassif/Canada/Siting%20Classification%20System7%20-%20Sep%202012.pdf
Wonder if unused telephone posts would work?
Yes that could work. Or even use one that’s in use if it’s on your land (with negotiation and permission).
would like details please on make/model of this power system?
40 watt solar panel —-> solar controller —–> 12v lead acid battery —–> 5v buck booster Ubec ——> Adafruit Feather M0 MCU.
Cool project though it was weird to see temperature in C but wind in MPH.
Yep – that’s a UK thing – it’s normal here!