I have a weather station I’ve built up over time using two Raspberry Pi B+s, a Raspberry Pi 2, a mesh radio network, and a bunch of different sensors from AdaFruit. As an aside, I really love AdaFruit; they’re incredibly responsive, ship immediately, have a great web site and lots of learning material, and they’re totally funded by sales. Great place, throw them some business.
The weather station is currently running version 09 of my Python software, which I won’t include here because it’s really long and convoluted because of the interface with non-I2C sensors.
As I mentioned, the system is built around a core Raspberry Pi B+. Here’s a picture of it. If you click on the picture it will bring up a much larger version so you can see more detail.
The RPi is in a frosted case. There’s a black ribbon cable that extends the GPIO pins to a solderless breadboard. There is also a white ribbon cable coming out the top that leads up to the window where there is a Raspberry Pi PiCam (RP_OV5467 5 MP camera) taped to the window to monitor the outside weather.
You can also see a SparkFun Redboard Arduino with an XBee Pro on a shield. More about that later.
This Raspberry Pi runs the primary software, which, as I noted, is written in Python 2.7. It reads the sensors, writes data into a remote mySQL database, and updates the Internet with current conditions. These updates occur every six minutes; the sensor reading and processing program runs from cron.
There are four primary sensor platforms: first is a bundle of sensors that are hanging out the bedroom window to measure outside conditions; second is a GPS unit that tracks the weather station’s location (not that it ever moves); third is a full size breadboard with digital sensors; fourth is a Geiger counter to measure radiation levels. We’ll talk about the digital inside platform first.
Featured Adafruit Products!
Adafruit HTU21D-F Temperature & Humidity Sensor Breakout Board: It’s summer and you’re sweating and your hair’s all frizzy and all you really want to know is why the weatherman said this morning that today’s relative humidity would max out at a perfectly reasonable 52% when it feels more like 77%. Enter the HTU21D-F Temperature + Humidity Sensor – the best way to prove the weatherman wrong! Read more.
SI1145 Digital UV Index / IR / Visible Light Sensor: Remember when you were a kid and there was a birthday party at the pool and your parents totally embarrassed you by slathering you all over with sunscreen and you were all “MOM I HAVE ENOUGH SUNSCREEN” and she wouldn’t listen? Well, if you had this UV Index sensor connected up to an Arduino you could have said “According to this calibrated SI1145 sensor from SiLabs, the UV index right now is 4.5 which means I do not need more sunscreen” and she would have been so impressed with your project that you could have spent more time splashing around. Read more.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
