WeatherPi Solar Power Weather Station – Boxing Up

April 1, 2015 Products, Project Curacao, Projects, Raspberry Pi, RasPiConnect, Real Time Clocks, Sensors, Solar Power, SunAirPlus, SwitchDoc Dual WatchDog Timer, SwitchDoc Products, Weather, WeatherPiArduino, WeatherRack
Solar Power
WeatherPi in the Box Ready for Final Wireup

WeatherPi Solar Power Weather Station – Boxing Up

We have completed the software (with a few glitches yet to be worked out) on the

Solar Power
WeatherPi in the Box Ready for Final Wireup

WeatherPi Solar Powered Weather Station.  The entire hardware system has been checked out from end to end including the WeatherRack Wind and Rain Sensors.  We spent two hours trying to figure out what was wrong with the WeatherRack, but it turned out we were looking a km/Hour rather than miles/hour.  That explained the difference.  Fixed.

We removed the HTU21D-F Humidity Sensor due to a I2C address conflict with the SunAirPlus solar power controller.  We already get the Inside temperature from the BMP180 and the flow of current from Solar Panels, Batteries and Pi on SunAirPlus were deemed to be more important.   The address conflict on the I2C bus can be easily fixed later with the SwitchDoc Labs I2C Mux board now in manufacturing.  We are seeing some glitches in reading the AM2315 Outside Temperature I2C device and we are looking at that problem in Software.  The AM2315 says it works at 3.3V I2C, but maybe it should really be on 5.0V I2C (which we have access to on the SunAirPlus board).  When using the AM2315 on Project Curacao, we had some similar problems that mostly went away when we moved the AM2315 from the Raspberry Pi (3.3V I2C) to the Arduino Battery Watchdog (5.0V I2C).

But first, time to put all the parts in the box and wire them up.  Here is a picture of the prototype layout running at night.

Solar Power
WeatherPi Solar Powered Weather Station Prototype

Updated Parts List (April 1, 2015)

Block Diagram

IMG_0876

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