Hello,
my name is Daniel and i'm new to Arduino. I live in Zagreb, Croatia, Europe. I'm a student of aerospace engineering and for my college project i would like to build a autonomous unattended weather station which sends weather data over a
GSM network in user defined intervals (every 10min or so) and feeds it to a web page. I would also like to be able to change this interval if i need to. The station should use a solar panel for power and i would also fit it with an extra
battery for backup.
I came to this idea when i went hang gliding the other day. We spent 4 hrs to get to our flying location only to return home after spending 2 hrs waiting for the winds to calm, but no luck. I will quote a paragraph from the Arduino book
"Practical Arduino - Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware" which describes exactly what i want to do:
Private Online Weather Station
Just outside Melbourne, Australia, a group of hang glider pilots is currently investigating installing one of these systems near a favorite but remote launch location that unfortunately has no local weather service. By installing theirown weather station nearby and feeding the data to a web service such as Pachube, Watch My Thing, or even just to Twitter, they can easily access historical and real-time weather data at the
launch location before they leave home, potentially saving them a three-hour drive only to discover that conditions aren't suitable and then driving another three hours home again. Setting up the project as a cooperative venture and
splitting the cost between a number of pilots means the cost to each individual is very low. Just one wasted trip would cost more in fuel than contributing to a share in their own personal weather station.
Is there any way i could get in touch with those people? I would like to know if they had done it and how they do it?
Weather forecasts which we use here are not very reliable and the idea is to build a weather station which we could set up in a remote location and leave it unattended, with minimum maintenance, reading the data through a web page which
i would build. We would also love to build a network of these stations and feed the data from all of them to our web page. Our windsurfing and kitesurfing friends also like the idea.
Commercial products like Davis, Vaisala, Lufft, Furuno etc are awesome and perfect for the job but are way beyond our budget. I spent the past 6 days researching this idea and came up with a lot of interesting information about weather
measurement techniques and solutions and also some very cool projects, with the name Arduino coming up repeatedly, so here i am as i will probably need all the help i can get.
I guess i should start by getting the necessary parts from the SparkFun shop, here's what i have in mind:
- Arduino Mega microcontroller board - Don't really know which one yet, Mega, Uno etc..
- Cellular Shield with SM5100B
- Quad-band Cellular Duck Antenna SMA -
- Weather meters
I still have a lot of reading to do, i want to familiarise myself with the Arduino system and i'm aware that the components i picked for my project may not be the best for the job, so bear with me Thankfully there is a vast resource
of information here on the forums, on the internet and some interesting books on the subject are available.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm looking forward to spend some time here.
P.S. i have some experience with soldering and electronic circuitry but it's been a while since i done anything. The last project was the FreeTrack head motion-tracking device for use with video games. I use mine with the MS Flight Simulator X and LockOn flight sims. Great stuff.