Ever since I was young I have been interested in science and also the weather. Later during my time in university I also developed an interest in embedded systems and micro-controllers. After playing a little bit in university and at the start of my career as an engineer, I lost the big urge to develop my own project.
In January 2014 I moved from Stuttgart, Germany to Detroit, Michigan to support a project here. After two years of exploring and two harsh Winters, I decided in November 2015 to get an Arduino Uno to reignite my tinkering passion. After turning LEDs on and off and getting motors to turn, I decided to create my own weather station. The idea of the Weathergadget was born.
If the name Weathergadget seems promising to you and you expect a little handy gadget, which predicts the weather 20 days in advance, then I need to say, that this is not it. It is rather an idea to create a self made weather station with conventional functions, however combined with scientific features like logging of values and showing them in a graph. The Weathergadget shall show the values that I want, how I want.
Here are the features I am currently working on:
- Measuring and logging the measured climate values on a SD card
- These are: outside / inside temperature, ambient pressure and outside humidity
- Display these values on a 7″ touchdisplay
- Wireless Transmission from outside sensor to the base station
- Display of time as well as sunrise and sunset times
- Provision of the climate data to the internet via Thingspeak
More features could be:
- Weather forecast obtained via wifi
Here is the hardware of my first prototype:
- ATmega1284 as the main microcontroller
- ATtiny84 as an auxiliary controller to receive wireless data
- DS1307 real time clock
- 433 MHz RF link transmitter and receiver
- MPL115A2 combined temperature and pressure sensor
- DHT22 combined temperature and humidity sensor
- 7″ Touchdisplay with 800×480, SPI communication and SD card reader
The software for the main controller is already pretty big and couldn’t run on the Arduino Uno anymore, so that I had to use the bigger Arduino Mega 2560. The software is written in C and more and more I try to avoid the Arduino library features to learn more about the AVR controllers.