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.