Solar Power WeatherPi Makes it Through the Winter

We are happy to report that the WeatherPi made it through the winter.   It became snow covered several times and went into hibernation because of no power, but it worked almost all the way through.   In January, we noticed it had not booted up for a couple of days and we opened the box and replaced the LiPo battery and everything was good again.  We also cut a hole in the bottom and covered it with a screen to provide some breathing for condensation control.   The silicon caulking material has gotten discolored around the Lightning Pylon, but it is still sealed.

What is Weather Pi?

WeatherPi is a do-it-yourself Raspberry Pi based Solar Powered Weather Station.   The solar power system consists of two Voltaic Systems 6V solar panels connected to a SunAirPlus solar power controller/data collector.   The weather sensors, databases and displays are done by the Raspberry Pi.

See the Instructable for WeatherPi here.

Solar Powered System

As you can see in the bock diagram below, the solar power panels and battery charging are done by the SunAirPlus board, while the monitoring of all the currents and voltages are done by the Raspberry Pi reading the embedded I2C INA3221 3 channel ADC.  SwitchDoc Labs also provides a breakout version of the INA3221.

One of the critical design aspects of the WeatherPi is how to turn the device on and off in the case of not having enough Solar Power to run the device 24/7.  This is called brownout and it happens with virtually every stand-alone solar power system.  Read more about solar power brownout here.

 

 

RasPiConnect Control Panel

Below you can see a RasPiConnect control panel showing the current status of the WeatherPi.  You can find RasPiConnect here.