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2018-04-09
This is an ongoing project, see the above links for more information on the project
A number of years ago, my father got a home weather station for his birthday. It is a simple station that reads wind, rain, temperature, and humidity. It was a good for seeing how much rain we got, or how hot it is at our house. Somewhat recently, it broke, we arenât sure what happened, but I decided to recycle the parts and create a new, better weather station.
My plan is to make a weather station that uploads its data to [wunderground.com] using their [PWS Upload Protocol]. The problem is that I need to send the weather data through a GET request, which I need a device with wifi. I could use an Arduino with wifi, but I donât think that our wifi has a good enough range to use from the roof. So I am using an [RF24L01+] module from the station to a raspberry pi 0 base station, which will upload the data.
The idea is simple but has a number of problems that need to be addressed, such as power. I plan to use a Li-ion battery with a solar panel to charge.
Every 30 seconds, the station will activate the radio, and send the weather data down to the base station, then listen for any commands for the next 2 seconds. This will allow me to make changes to some constants in the station without having to reflash. I should also be able to ask the station to do things, such as reset.
The commands are single chars followed by whatever else is needed. ie âSâ is for setting the value of a constant, followed by a char of the code for the constant to be changed, followed by the value. If the command is a request, the station will send a packet back to the base.
I am using an Adafruit Feather chip which has a Li-ion charging circuit built-in, so all I need to do is connect a solar panel to the charger. However, I ran into an issue, where when the power drops too low to charge, then rises back, the charging circuit will stop charging as expected, but will not start charging again until the solar panel is disconnected and reconnected. I plan to create a circuit with a mosfet and voltage reader so that the station can deactivate the solar panel when it canât supply enough current.