I built this type of weather station before. But unlike the last times, when I blogged only after I completed it, this time I will blog during building it. I do not spend too much time on this. Still working from home I often lack the energy going back to my desk in the evening and writing code or designing stuff. So I spend about 30 minutes each day, making this a slow build. But hey, even when working slowly I will complete this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the fourth version of my outdoor weather station. The following hardware concecpts I tried so far:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this version I decided to try a new microcontroller board – the Heltec<\/a> Cubecell Board<\/a> (they have a number of boards available, just check). This board is a makers dream:<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this feature neither Arduino nor Adafruit has:<\/p>\n\n\n\n On other boards you can power down the board, if you are lucky the memory stays powered and you do not have to re-connect to the LoRa network, but your sensors are constantly drawing current. With the Cubecell Vext<\/sub> connector, you can power down your sensors when the board goes into deep sleep and power them up again when it awakes. Of course some sensors need re-initialization after that but it still is way more energy efficient then keeping them running. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ok, lets to back to building a weather station. This blog entry follows my process and does not immediately present the finished product. So my first steps are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n On hardware you need:<\/p>\n\n\n\n For trial I just put everything together with cables and connectors. Even in the finished product I avoid soldering if I can, because if something gets wet or wears out, plugging in a new part is way easier then to re-solder. You can see my setup in the picture above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Connect all sensors via I2C bus and connect power to the Vext pin of the controller. Solar panel goes to V* and the battery to the battery connector on the back. Next is uploading software and testing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you start from scratch this is the hardest part. But I built LoRa based weather stations before so I could re-use a lot of my code. The only thing Heltec (as everybody) does differently is the LoRa part of the code. Fortunately they provide many examples in their Github repository<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAssemble the hardware<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Create the software<\/h2>\n\n\n\n