Weather station installation

Sensor array installed on the roof at last.
Sensor array installed on the roof at last.

Home early from work and a beautiful afternoon, so I thought, it’s time to install the weather station sensor array on the roof. There is a pipe from a flue or something up there that is doing nothing and ideal. Didn’t take too long, used the compass on the phone and checked the satellite image on Google Maps to get a good idea of where North is. Even whilst I was up there I could see that it was picking up much more wind rather than when it had been down low and sheltered.

There’s a whole heap of updates still to write, but this is now sending data to my Arduino which is getting pushed to the internet along with some data from sensors inside the house.

Stay tuned.

Code time again

Useful links:

These articles together form the source that I drew inspiration from. I didn’t have to do my own signal timing analysis which sounds fascinating but complicated. The above code examples however are written either for Raspberry Pi, or for Arduino using different models of Fine Offset sensors and transmitters.

Receiving sensor data

The next step was to figure out how to receive the sensor data being transmitted to the display base station. There’s plenty of articles on the web describing parts of the puzzle, but I didn’t find any one article that explained it all. For testing I used a Freetronics LeoStick and a 433MHz RF receiver module set up on a breadboard, so I could leave the original sketch still running on my desktop feeding data to the web. The LeoStick was particularly easy to use as I could just plug it into a USB port and test code from anywhere in the house without being tethered to power.

My weather station

My birthday was coming up and an online retailer had a tempting online discount so I ordered one of these:

.WH1081

It’s a common ‘generic’ model made by Fine Offset, WH-1081, sold here by many retailers as an XC0348. Of course I had to wait until my birthday to actually ‘receive’ it and then it was back to work and no time to play. Finally it did get put together, and it has sat out the back on a small table to test it. Firstly I haven’t had an opportunity to get on the roof, and secondly, if I want to do some decoding of the data it is much easier if you can observe it close up, and test the sensors individually. Although some data is probably inaccurate, such as wind, the readings generally agree with the weather bureau. Here’s its current position:

XC3048 weather station set up for testing purposes in the back yard.
XC3048 weather station set up for testing purposes in the back yard.