New Weather Station Build Pt.2

The sensors are good! The electronics are that is. I've checked over the anemometer, wind vane and rain gauge and all are working properly. They are going to need a little work to get them back to shipshape again and I may even pot them in, although the actual board have fared quite well. Only a bit of dull solder on the wind vane PCB. As you can see form the images all the sensors use good, old, conventional reed relays and a magnet on the spinney bit. I may swap these out for hall effect sensors in the future. One thing I would like is a better resolution for the wind vane. As it stands I get N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W and NW. It would be great to have NNE and ENE etc. around the whole thing. That would also work better (I think) with the wind direction indicator on that ridiculous display I bought.

I am going to swap the cable and RJ connectors for something a bit harder wearing and instead of the anemometer and wind vane being daisy-chained, I will wire each sensor back to a junction box, then an outdoor rated CAT5/6 cable back to the brains. I have already removed the old cable for testing so is just a case of throwing some new cable on it. The wind vane needs rebuilding (physically/mechanically) and I want to modify the rain gauge for a larger surface area, but the anemometer seems quite OK, aside from the PCB mounts failing. All of that should be fairly straight forward.

I have thrown an ESP32 onto a protoboard, two actually and got the electronics for the debounce all working. I have assimilated all the code I need from openweatherstation.com and have it working in a very basic fashion. I've soldered header pins onto the sensors for now for testing. I'll remove them when I put new cable in after testing is completed, including verifying the readings and calibrate if needed. That would just be the anemometer and rain gauge though. I have a BME280 running locally at the moment and everything is all going to plan. I need to add some formulas for windchill, heat index, apparent temperature, rainfall rate and Zambretti forecast, all of which is just number crunching code. I am thinking about integrating my Solar Monitor 5 Million in some way with the weather station for displaying UV levels once I have that a little more calibrated, maybe even have a reading for how scorching hot the sun is with the heat collector I made. I have an enclosure on it's way for the ESP/boards and a massive 40x4 LCD (in green! 😀 ) that I may use for displaying numbers, for diagnostic purposes mainly. It would be a good project to use that display on. I have even been looking at e-paper displays that I could make a nice display for my desk, or wall.

I also need to work out how I am going record and store the data. I have generally used CSVs for small projects like this, but I may use MySQL this time as it would be much easier to access the data to say compare today with this day last year and things along those lines. MySQL is far easier to dig out records than 100 separate CSVs. My general criteria for the software side is as follows:

• Record and update displays every 60 seconds (1440 records per day)
• Update wind speed/direction/gusts etc on displays as fast as possible
• Calculate all the fun stuff (heat index, dew point etc etc)
• Display certain readings with rising or falling icons/notes. Basic trending.
• Be able to display any historic readings easily
• All the graphs
• Compare two periods from any two times. This could be today against this day last year, or last month against the month before. After gathering data for a while this would give credence to 'yeah, the weather is much worse this year than last.'
• Show records (highs, lows etc) for all/most sensors. records could be all time, daily, monthly, annually. MySQL would help with this a lot.
• Display on phone one way or another
• Display on web - This has to look like my old weather station page that was fed by Cumulus. It also has to work with the 'Steel Series' gauges I have on the old site - see here: http://www.schmoozie.co.uk/weather/
• Display on desk or wall
• Display to that ridiculous display I bought
• Have alerts. It would be wonderful to be alerted when the wind speed or gusts get to a certain level. Also rainfall. Too much too soon and give an alert.
• Anything I have forgotten
• Anything new I think of

I will leave you with some pictures until the next update.

Wind vane PCB top

Wind vane PCB bottom

Anemometer - this has one reed switch, but cleverly, it's orientation gives two pulses per revolution

The actual board(s). I made it like this because I didn't have a big protoboard and I wanted plenty of space for mods in the future. The ribbon cable will go to a 8 pin connector to connect to the anemometer, wind vane and rain gauge.

Archived from radmon.org - originally posted 01/05/2024