Weather station

Board can be purchased at tindie

https://www.tindie.com/products/Cemb/esp8266-extension/

Now it includes:

-Weather station, sending data to the Thingspeak

-Receiver, getting the data from the Thingspeak and displaying it.

Source code is shared: https://github.com/victor999/esp8266_weather_thingspeak

I put the case design on Thingiverse

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2388417

Basically this weather station can work in different concepts.

1. Log to thingspeak (thingspeak.com). Powerful logging with different display options and matlab analysis. This is the way how it works outside of my house.

2. Amazon AWS IOT logging. Very strong security and ready to use services. My second station (indoor) works like this.

3. Private MQTT server.

One of the important properties of IOT projects is power consumption, especially when it works standalone and takes its power from renewable energy source. With this information you can see how your device performs and where you have place to improve.

I set up power monitoring, based on Adafruit INA219 breakout and another ESP8266 powered from main electricity supply. The data rate and amount can be high, so I decided to go with MQTT protocol. I set up MQTT backend, mySQL database and simple front-end for monitoring data online. Everything is hosted at my online server and has no limitations of the data transfers.

Based on this information, I decided to put station to sleep every 100 sec. The resulted power consumption is very satisfying. My battery has capacity of 2500 mah and it recharged every day from solar panels. It looks like I can put a few more consumers.

Station mounted and reporting data to weather underground. It measures temperature, humidity and pressure. I have a wind speed sensor also. Need to think how to connect it.

There are 2 very useful repositories:

Adafruit BME280 library

github for weather underground connection

ESP 8266 on board with I2C interface and printed case for it

2 Solar panels, battery and converter. Printed panels connector and box for converter.

Generates stable 5V