Tutorial: Part 14 -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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Results!

The GroveWeatherPi has been outside for about 2 weeks now. Working perfectly. You can see the box being charged up and then going to battery power as the sun moves behind the house. We have had hot days and cold nights as we are just starting to move out of Summer into Fall. It is not quite generating enough electricity to run 24 hours at the moment (because it is in the shade until 9am and after about 3pm – not quite 8 hours of sun). This will be fixed when we move it up to the top of the house where it will have sun about 12 hours a day on average (when the sun is not behind clouds!).

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 have now replaced it with a WiPi USB Dongle which works well. Interestingly enough, the WiPi USB dongle reports it is using the RT5370 also, but the WiPi works.

Improvements

We aren’t building graphs for the Wind Speed, Direction and Rain yet. Just reporting the current values on the RasPiConnect control panel. All the data is being saved into MySQL, however.

The temperature and lightning displays need to be fixed and improved. The cool thing is that all of this can be done remotely!   Remember that you still have to “Pat the Dog” if you shutdown the GroveWeatherPi software.

What Else Can You Do With This? 

Here are some additional ideas for projects based on GroveWeatherPi:

• Replacing the WiFi with a GSM data connection (or just send text messages)
• Make it tweet the weather!
• Make a custom Facebook posting with your weather
• Adding a GPS receiver and store that data. You now have a mobile weather station! When it gets back to WiFi all the stored data will be available.
• Adding additional air quality sensors, UV sensors, Dust sensors. You have a lot of I2C addressing space that you can fill

Conclusion

The GroveWeatherPi is a great project for learning how to prototype and build projects with your Raspberry Pi.   This is a full fledged weather station with many sensors and functions.   Stay tuned to switchdoc.com as we will be adding tutorials on how to install CWOP, Twitter, Weeex, WeatherUnderground, MQTT and others!