Weather station

Projects
1

In another thread on this forum I have been posting a few pictures of my latest project. It is a weather station powered by an Electric Imp.

The weather sensors I use is from sparkfun (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8942) and it got a rain gauge, wind vane and anemometer.

Sparkfun already got a guide on how to make such a weather station, but it uses an arduino, a weather shield to connect to the sensors, an electric imp shield, and an electric imp. My version will be just my board which will hold all the components the electric imp needs to work, the connectors that match the connectors on the weather sensors, a TMP36 for measuring the temperature, and two relays just for expanding the boards function.

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During the process of making this pcb I learnt how to create new components in eagle, and before ordering the pcb’s I decided to print it out on paper just to place some components over it to see if I had done it right.

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So far it looks like I did it right :slight_smile:

Now I wait for the last smd components to arrive, the pcb’s themself, and a stencil to make applying the solder paste easier. :slight_smile:

Source code will be released as soon as I have it untangled with the other code I got running on the imp I am testing on, and when I have tested it all works as expected. :smiley:

More text:



2

That looks amazing, good job!

Have you though about adding a Barometric Pressure Sensor ?
Is there any crowdsource weather sites you can send your data to like PressureNET?

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11824

3

I did think of adding that, but decided to get this first version working first. :slight_smile:

This is the first time I try to make a board for the Electric Imp, with everything it needs on the board so it doesn’t need the april board.

Might add it on a next version, along with a i2c shift register so it can handle more relays. :slight_smile:

I don’t know of any sites to send the data to, and I haven’t searched either, I am most likely only going to use the json output from mine anyways just to read it from freeboard, and use one of the relays to control my garage door so it closes when the wind is too strong and going directly into the garage.

4

Just added something about how I am going to mount it to my garage.

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5

I print out PCBs quite a bit as well. Its great for check sizes of enclosures, ect. There have been some customs delays with PCB manufacturers in China lately. If you don’t mind paying extra, Pentalogix has a killer quick turn prototyping service. You can get PCBs back in a couple of days, and the silkscreen quality is excellent. They also have a deal on getting a full copy of Eagle as well. Check it out if you are interested in that.

6

I am from Denmark, getting things from USA takes most often same amount of time as it does from China because of customs here. And I don’t understand that deal on eagle… The full copy is $1,640?

7

Today I finished the clamps which will hold the weather sensors to my garage.

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8

And things are starting to kick off…

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Wrote more text here: http://captain-slow.dk/2014/10/11/weather-station-pcbs-and-stencil/

9

Those are some very pretty mounts!

10

" don’t know of any sites to send the data to, and I haven’t searched "

I did a quick google about it looks like openweathermap would like your data and could be another outlet to show your creation too.

http://openweathermap.org/stations

11

I might set it up to also post to that when I got everything working @back_ache :slight_smile:

But first I need to tackle some other problems. My first problem is that my flyback diodes for the relays still haven’t arrived, so I need to find a way to solder those on later… The next problem is the transistors does not like the relays, and can’t drive them, even when it falls within their specs… might be because they are some random chinese ones. :confused:

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But besides that it is starting to look like something, and it also popped up in the IDE the very first time I powered it up. :slight_smile:

12

Problem found… I messed up on the transistors… :frowning:

13

With SOT23’s you can usually turn them upside-down and rotate them to fix almost any footprint mistakes :slight_smile:

14

Kinda what I ended up doing too. They just stand up now, with a leg from a resistor to connect the last pin to the board again.

15

Data from my weather station can now be seen live on https://freeboard.io/board/GsY2py and some charts can be seen on https://xively.com/feeds/353228423

16

Tried to connect to the openweathermap api, but didnt have much luck. At first I was not authorized, then when putting username and password in, it responded with nothing, and no data was put on the site too.