Tutorial: Part 8 -Building a Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Weather Station – GroveWeatherPi

The Raspberry Pi is a fabulous device to on which to build your projects.    The GroveWeatherPi project is designed to show the capabilities of this computer while remaining accessible to a diverse Maker community.

GroveWeatherPi is a Solar Powered Raspberry Pi WiFi connected weather station designed for Makers by SwitchDoc Labs ( www.switchdoc.com). This is a great system to build and tinker with. All of it is modifiable and all source code is included.

This tutorial for building your own Solar Powered Weather Station based on the Raspberry Pi consists of 14 parts.

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Optional Section – Dual WatchDog Timer

The addition of the external watchdog timer improves the reliability of your solar powered weather station by removing the scenario talked about in the Watchdog section earlier in this chapter.   To add this board, one wire must be soldered on the TP3 (COut) on the USB Power Control part as shown below.   This wire is connected to a female jumper header that connects to the DOG1_ARDUINORESET (unfortunately named) on the Dual WatchDog Timer.

FYI, the next version of the USB PowerControl Board will add pins to both of the TP pads so even that soldering part is going away!

Setting the WatchDog Timer Length

To get your WatchDog timer to wait for 240 seconds before rebooting you must take a small screwdriver and set the timeout internal on the board.

The timeout interval for each WatchDog timer is set by turning the  TM1 single turn potentiometer.  It can be set from 30 seconds to 240 seconds.  It is set by turning it over a 270 degree range.  Turn the small screw to face the 240 second mark in the above figure.

We used strong Velcro with adhesive to mount the parts in the box.

Make sure you place the battery toward the bottom as it is heavy and the heat of the summer could make it come loose.