WeatherPi – 7 Days in the Sun
What is WeatherPi?
SwitchDoc Labs is in the process of building a Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Weather
Station. The design will be released as a SwitchDoc Appnote, an Instructable and a series of posts on SwitchDoc.com. We have now completed the software and we are placing the device outside. Parts list is at the bottom of this article.
What Issues are Left?
We are working three small issues.
1) The plug for the WeatherRack Weather Sensors need to be better secured to the outside of the box. Right now it is just attached and sealed by silicon caulking. Too easily broken with small amounts of pressure. We have pressure cable pass throughs that we can use for this.
2) The cheap RT5370 Wireless Adapter WiFi dongle we are using is shutting itself down occasionally. The Raspberry Pi keeps running, collecting data, etc., but we are locked out of the system. When we look at the WiFi adaptor when it has shut itself down, it is no longer blinking blue, but the Raspberry Pi and all the external hardware is still running. Looking at the web shows some people having had similar problems with this dongle. We are replacing it with a better one from Adafruit. More when we have done that.
3) Humidity is too high inside of the box. We are going to add small vent hole at the bottom of the box to correct for this. Don’t want that condensing humidity.
How is Weather Pi Working?
In a word. Beautifully! From the RasPiConnect graphs below (the graphs are generated on the Raspberry Pi using MatPlotLib). You can see the charging cycle of the battery in the second screen and the various directions of current into the battery in the first screen.
On April 26, 2015, we put the WeatherPi WiFi Solar Power Weather Station out in the weather. Today we are collecting the data from RasPiConnect and are presenting the graphs and screens below. The glitch at the end of the graph is when we carried the unit inside to check out the operation and what was going on with the WiFi dongle.
Updated Parts List (May 5, 2015)
- WeatherRack Weather Sensors
- BUD NEMA Box from Amazon.com
- VoltaicSystems Solar Panel(s) – 2 panels
- Raspberry Pi A+
- Raspberry Pi Compatible WiFi USB Dongle
- SunAirPlus Solar Power Controller
- USB Control (SwitchDoc Labs – now available)
- 4 Channel I2C Mux Breakout Board
- SwitchDoc Labs Dual WatchDog Timer
- WeatherPiArduino Weather Board
- Embedded Adventures I2C Lightning Detector MOD-1016 board
- DS3231 RTC With EEPROM
- AM2315 Outdoor Temperature and Humidity Sensor
- BMP180 Barometer and Temperature Sensor
- Ada fruit HTU21D-F Temperature/Humidity breakout board
- Adafruit 32KB FRAM I2C breakout board
- Adafruit ADS1015 4 Channel A/D I2C board
- Adafruit PKCELL Lithium Ion Battery Pack – 3.7V 6600mAh
- Waterproof 8 Pin Plug from Amazon.com
- 2 Dual Row 4 Position Covered Screw Terminal Block Strip from Amazon.com
- RasPiConnect Control Panel
Block Diagram
