New Weather Station Build Pt.1

About 4 years ago my weather station failed. It was only a cheap WH1080 from Maplin (remember them?), but it did it's job for about 8 years. The sensors were getting a bit janky and then the transmitter stopped working. I managed to find a replacement transmitter in China and that did pair with my receiver, but I think the receiver is also broke, or the two aren't quite compatible as I can't save the settings on the receiver and Cumulus is telling me that it is getting some duff data. Now it lies in pieces as shown in the picture. Next stop.... the scrap bin.

Goodbye old faithful cheapo weather station. May you rest in pieces. ❤️

Looking for a replacement, ideally a Davis or similar ilk, I realised how damn expensive they are! I don't have a grand (£1000) to throw at a couple of spinney things that make some numbers! Looking at cheap ones that may work with Cumulus... Well, I couldn't really find any. At least not for a good price or a guarantee it would work with Cumulus. So then I looked at Arduino weather station projects and it does appear that most of the heavy lifting with the calculations for wind speed and such are already done. I know how to calculate dew points and wind chill, heat index etc so really it should just be a case of putting everything together on an ESP32 or something. Here is someone else's project from about 6 years ago: https://openweatherstation.com/ows/index.php This uses the same sensors as my own, so the code should work fine with mine. All I have to do is assimilate it.

I decided that I will refurbish my old sensors (anemometer, wind vane and rain gauge) and build a new weather station from scratch and pull some bits of code from wherever and put it all together. So I'll document it all here in case someone finds it useful. At the minute all I have is a crate of bits. I have new bearings for the anemometer and wind vane. I have some BME280s and some Dallas temperature sensors tat I could dig into the soil. I have always fancied that, having a couple of temperature sensors in the ground. One about a meter down and one quite close to the surface. I need to redesign and rebuild the wind vane as I rebuilt it some years back, but over engineered it and made it too heavy. I was trying to make it more accurate, but I think it's a lost cause really due to it's location when outside. So I'll simplify it some and make it lighter this time. It may work, it may not. I am going to modify the rain gauge to increase the surface area of the rain collected. This will increase the resolution of the rain gauge, probably by a factor of about 2. It uses a 'tipping bucket' mechanism to count the water that runs through it and each bucket tip is about 3ml of rain. A larger rain collection surface area will move around twice the amount of rain through the tipping bucket, so effectively making each tip 1.5ml of rain. Having a rain gauge again would be really nice and will complement (or not) some of those occasional radiation rises from time to time.

I was looking about at other weather stations for ideas and inspiration and I found an old weather station display (it may be the processor too) on ebay for £10. So I bid, won and bought it as fast as I could. And it looks awesome! What's not to love about it! 😊 I will probably have to heavily modify it, or even just use the case and make my own innards, but this will most certainly be a display for my weather station when I get it running! I love it already!

Archived from radmon.org - originally posted 29/04/2024