WeatherPi Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Project

What is WeatherPi?

Note: A newer version of this project is available. See the GroveWeatherPi.

Weather Pi is the SwitchDoc Labs Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Weather Station. The design has been released as a SwitchDoc Appnote, an Instructable and a series of posts on SwitchDoc.com.

WeatherPi is a solar powered Raspberry Pi WiFi connected weather station designed for Makers by SwitchDoc Labs. This is a great system to build and tinker with. All of it is modifiable and all source code is included. The most important functions are:

Senses 20 different environmental values
Completely Solar Powered
Has a full database containing history of the environment (MySQL)
Monitors and reports lots of data on the solar powered system – great for education!
Self contained and monitored for brownouts and power issues
Can be modified remotely
Download your data to crunch it on your PC
Can be modified to do SMS (Text) messaging, Twitters, webpages and more
Has an iPad Based Control Panel
Easy to connect to CWOP, Twitter, WeatherUnderground, etc

Blog Postings

Latest SwitchDoc Blog on WeatherPi is WeatherPi Power System Performance.

All Blogs on WeatherPi are here.

Articles on WeatherPi

Instructables

SwitchDoc Labs has published three Instructables about the WeatherPi.

Build your own Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Weather Station

Add a Lightning Detector to your Raspberry Pi Weather Station

Join the IOT with your Raspberry Pi Weather Station with CWOP

Raspberry Pi Geek Magazine

Raspberry Pi Geek Issue 7 – Connecting a Weather Station to your Arduino

Raspberry Pi Geek Issue 12 – Protect your Electronics from Lightning Strikes

Block Diagram For WeatherPi

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.