A Picaxe Weather Station | |||
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ThanksThis project wouldn't have been possible without help and guidance from several Picaxe Forum members. Some of the sensors for weather monitoring are complicated to use for various reasons and, without the invaluable help from people on the forum - and elsewhere on the web - who are willing to share their knowledge, it's unlikely this weather station would have materialized - at least not in its present form.
Overview![]() The weather station is built around "Picaxe" ® Microcontrollers from Revolution Education Ltd and comprises two main units: The outdoor unit, to which the "outdoor weather" sensors are connected, sends its data at approximately 2-second intervals, using a 433MHz licence-exempt transmitter, to a matching receiver in the indoor unit. The indoor unit itself displays the received data on a 20 x 4 LCD display along with the barometric pressure, which is measured locally in the indoor unit. I've tried to keep the design as simple as possible while still providing a "usable" weather monitor. Currently, neither unit has any datalogging facilities built in but the indoor unit is able to send the data onwards to a PC via a serial COM Port connection.
The station has taken several months from planning to completion and, overall, I'm very pleased with the result. I'm particularly pleased that I was able to build everything from scratch myself with normal DIY tools (with the exception of soldering a couple of Surface Mounted chips). It suits my purposes although I suspect it may always be a "work in progress" - particularly with regard to the presentation of the data on the LCD display. A graphical display would look much nicer! But, if you're thinking of building a weather station yourself, hopefully you'll find some useful ideas as well as noting things that you'll do differently! Most of the material on the following pages was written as I went along. The station has only just been installed outside so it's too early to tell how successful the design will be. I won't be too surprised if parts of it need modifying or re-designing altogether. I'll report back......
The Outdoor SensorsThere are outdoor sensors to measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind direction and wind speed. The sensors are a mix of mechanical and electronic devices. The following pages show each sensor in detail. Continue to the next page with the link below or jump to details of a specific sensor using the links in the blue navigation bar on the left.
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