About the project
This project was inspired by my love of seasonal outdoor Vermont landscapes and the recreational activities that fuel my adventures on land and water year round. The project was born out of a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology from Vermont Technical College degree requirement. The senior project guidelines seemed to line up well with the weather station from technical, budgetary, and schedule constraints. Several other project ideas that were interesting from a personal perspective ultimately fell by the wayside for one or more of the previously mentioned constraints.
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Focus was placed on the process with weekly status updates to peers and professors consisting of details related to technical progress, budget through bill of materials, and time management through project schedule tracking. Weekly updates frequently turned into brainstorming sessions with paths to issue resolution resulting. The atmosphere was truly collaborative.
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Some project technical description follows here. At the heart of this project is the Arduino Pro Mini 5Volt, 16MHz microprocessor board offered by Arducam. The Arduino Pro Mini board employs the well known and fully featured Atmega328P-AU microchip. Since this project was destined to be remotely located and solar powered, the Arduino Pro Mini was chosen over other popular microprocessor boards due to its relatively small physical size as well as very low power consumption capabilities. The Arduino handles digital and analog inputs from weather sensor as well as provides power to these sensors. The sensor readings are aggregated and formatted on the Arduno into a string whose parameters are defined by the Weather Underground Personal Weather Station (PWS) upload protocol. Once the string is created, it is then fed over a serial bus from the Arduino to an ESP8266 WiFi module which authenticates to a WiFi router then periodically sends data sets to Weather Underground and my PWS web page.
The remote power issue was resolved through business with a very helpful company operating out of Brooklyn, NY named Voltaic. A Voltaic representative (Jeff) helped guide me through product selection through project power consumption requirements. Ultimately, I decided on their 9 Watt Solar Kit which allowed a painless transition from the development and debug bench to the out of doors and real operation. The Voltaic V44 Battery Pack provides two USB ports which exactly match the requirements of my project making for a plug and play solution. According to my rough calculations, this power solution provides 100% more power than required. One area of concern that will play out in the winter of 2018-2019 is the low temperature tolerance of the LiPO battery cell. Voltaic specifies valid operation down to about 0 degrees Fahrenheit but Jeff advises other customers report operation well below 0. We shall see. Normally, we record temps down to -25 F :)
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For presentation purposes, the interim incarnation of this project is portable. An unused microphone stand on loan from VTC provided the perfect foundation for the project and should prove useful for presentation to the College community. The weather station is destined for permanent installation on a mast attached to and extended above my garage. This spot is roughly located in the middle of my property, has great Southern sun exposure, and is clear from other structures in order to keep noise out of the system.