Projects> Arduino Weatherstation

Around 2015, I was really into drones and decided to take on another electronics project. After searching around, I found the Wimpy Weather Station on the Sparkfun.com website. Although the project included a lot of things that I didn't need to worry about (Colorado weather and battery/solar), it was still a great project to sharpen my maker skills. I didn't connect a wind-vane or rain sensor to the unit and it is tied to my gutters so it doesn't tip over.

It has spent over five years in this location, with zero issues. Occasionally I will pull it down and clean out the bugs that have made it a temporary home. I wanted to add multiple things to it like GPS, the missing sensors and other things, but really didn't want to break it. If you visit the Sparkfun website to see the original post, you will see the author connects to a solar cell and battery and anchors the station on the roof. I am fortunate enough to have a close power connection, but still used the remote-reboot option for not updating the Arduino in the rain with my laptop. Using the Electric Imp, was something new to me, but was easily explained by the author. In a sense, the Arduino takes the readings from the weather shield and pushes to the internet using the Imp.

Connecting the Imp to my network was pretty difficult. Make sure your phone is connected to the internal network before launching the Imp software on your phone. Using a blinking programming technique, it allows the Imp to connect to your internal network. I have to do this every time there is a change on the wireless password on my network, which is a little painful. Once you set this up, you will really question every time you want to change your password for your WiFi.

When the weather station was originally set up, it echo'ed the http statement to two sources: Sparkfun and Weather Underground. I realized after a couple years that the Arduino was reporting an error on the Imp web-frontend. It was stating the link for Sparkfun was not responding to the query. This was due to Sparkfun deactivating the playground for makers to support the queries. I opened the Imp website and found the http:// request that was sending this to Sparkfun and commented out the line. The information is only going to Weather Underground now, which I have grown to like the reports over the years. You can even grab some HTML code from them and imbed the station on a webpage.

I would suggest that you have some skills in soldering and coding before attacking this project. It requires a little more abilities than someone that just built a couple drones.