General post on weather station

I have been busy with work and working on and off with the weather station. I have been working a bit on the FARS lately and have gone with plant pot basses with a 120mm diameter and made a 50mm hole in the centre for sensors and a 50mm PC fan I found/had lying around. I used 160mm 5mm thread bar by three, I used straws to hold each base at 10mm apart; each base is 20mm, 10mm is half way where the centre rim is, so it gives a nice overlap.

Weather Station - Anemometer

So I have been working on the anemometer on and off for the last month as I have also been working on another project. I have also been working on the final design of the weather vane setup and slicing my thumb :) This will be part one of this part of the weather station, discussing mainly the anemometer.

The basic build

Weather Station - General Update

A general update of the weather station. The anemometer is coming along nicely, except for changes in final design and construction which I keep making. I am working on a build post for that, which should be up soon.

I received components I ordered the other day so that I can start getting some basic data.

I have a BMP180, DHT22, and 2 RFM12Bs, pictured below for fun:

I have so far tested the DHT22 with the library from Adafruit, it worked well.
I have yet to have some time to test the other stuff and also to find a suitable library for the RFM12 module which doesn't have a heap load of stuff added in. I also have to make level shifters for the two transceivers.

I got these through a local distributor for SparkFun Electronics who had reasonable prices, which is better than paying the import costs and overseas postage.

A new name! Barium Electronics

So I have been toying with some names for my business & blog as the name is representative of my blog and of my actual business I have. I have thus officially re-named my blog and business today as:

•     The company is not too big that it will cause a huge mess with customers and my blog.
•     Search the word Ziggy, Ziggy Electronics or ZE this gave some weird  results which are not fit for a business when customers search.
•      Most people scoff at the name? Or at least a quizzical look, possibly the odd word.

So I have changed the name to something unique and more related to the electronics side:

Barium Electronics 

This is a name which is not used as a company name by anyone I can find. This should make the blog easily found by search engines as not much turns up in electronics projects, this should increase the traffic.

Weather Station - Rain Gauge

For the first build post I will be starting with the rain gauge. This is based off the tipping bucket rain gauge method. These are pretty easy to make and get running.

Weather Station - Introduction

I have decided to dive into the adventure of building a functional automatic weather station(AWS), there are a lot of these projects on the web and are easily copied and pasted, but I feel this is not worth doing because you don't really learn anything from this.

What I plan to do is write a series of blog posts detailing the build process of the weather station, describing my build of all parts separately and then finally bringing it together in a final post and a permanent web app with forecasting and logging of weather for where I live.

I will be designing the station to be completely self-powered, this will be done by using a wind turbine and a solar panel, these will charge I am thinking of 3V coin cells, each one possibly powering a set of sensors and the micro.

The weather station will send the collected data to the base station located in the house and will manage storage and the method of either hosting or pushing the data to a storage site.

The station will contain the following functionality:

• Temperature
• Humidity
• Wind Speed
• Wind Direction
• Barometric Pressure
• Light Intensity
• Visibility( or a sort of mist sensor)
• Rain Gauge
• Wireless Transceiver

I'll add more as I find other interesting stuff to monitor.

The base will have:

• Display for sensed values
• Wireless Transceiver
• Storage
• GSM to upload to server if needed
• A display for the current or predicted weather
• RTC

The Transceivers will be either 434MHz or the 2.4GHz range, although its only < 9m of distance between sensor and base(line of sight).

I also believe I might have a use for this site http://www.weewx.com/, it produces graphs and pages for weather station data and is LINUX compatible! Therefore the next logical thought is to run it on a Raspberry Pi which the system supports which will be awesome.