Tutorial: Part 13 -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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The Final Step

Your final step is to connect the wire shown in the table below.   This wire allows the WatchDog timer to turn off the power to the Weather Station if the WatchDog expires.    The reason you haven’t connected this wire yet is that you haven’t been running GroveWeatherPi.py which “Pats the Dog” and keeps this form happening.   If you are are going to be doing a lot of development or changes, it is a good thing to remove this wire or run another program that “Pats the Dog” while you are developing.

WatchDog Board JP5/ArduinoReset

USB PowerControl TP3/COUT – Soldered To Pad   (DO NOT CONNECT THIS WIRE UNITL YOU ARE DONE TESTING AND MODIFYING THE SOFTWARE!)

Cut one end of 12 inch Female to Female Header Jumper Wire and solder it to TP3/COUT pad as shown below

 

Building A Control Panel Using RasPiConnect

We use RasPiConnect ( www.milocreek.com ).to build our control panels for our projects. It allows us to put graphs, controls, buttons, sliders, etc. up on our iPad/iPhone screens without having to write apps. RasPiConnect works on Raspberry Pi’s and on Arduinos. We have used this software on 5 different projects, with GroveWeatherPi being the latest.

How to build a control panel for GroveWeatherPi is beyond the scope of this Chapter, but here is the tutorial ( https://www.switchdoc.com/2014/07/build-control-panels-tutorial-raspiconnect/ )  we wrote for doing what we are doing for GroveWeatherPi. We are using the same command passing mechanism in GroveWeatherPi that we used in MouseAir.  RasPiConnect comes with an excellent, comprehensive manual here ( www.milocreek.com ) .

 

All the RasPiConnect code that we used in this project  is on github under github.com/switchdoclabs. Note that only the directory local is in the repository as that is the only places changes to the code are made as explained in the RasPiConnect manual.