Hi, looking for ideas with my outdoor Arduino weather station with some data logging and wireless remote display. Example- reading outdoor temperature, logging min/max and historical values. Range of 150' is fine.
I started with 433MHz transceivers but they drift over temperature and are unreliable. Next I used Zigbee but setup was so complicated and it didn't perform well. The range was meh even with high gain antennas and packet loss was an issue.
Wi-fi is looking better and better, but I don't know how to draw a (webpage) graph to plot temperature readings, like once a minute for the past day. I think expecting the Arduino to serve up such a webpage is way too much unless there is a second CPU on the Wi-Fi shield? Then the entire weather station would be stand-alone.
I'd suggest that, rather then have your weather station attempt to serve a web page, it should, instead, just serve the raw data in JSON format.
JSON can be easily read by any webserver and then be formatted in any way you please.
Since JSON is also well understood by javascript, If you are displaying real time data, you could even have client side script, updating the page direct from the weather station.
I'm sorry, but I'm kinda sour on Zigbee products from Digi :0
I spent many hours with the XBee XB24 modules in X-CTU, also researching on the web and trying different settings and firmware loads.
Found the Xbee module's baud rate at 57.6K and higher is off due to the module's integer crystal divider ratios (58.8K and 111.1K). That was a bear to figure out, as my Arduino was communicating "most" of the time with the modules.
In the end, packet loss was always happening. Even with a simple one-way LED blink program at close range.
I might spend a bunch of hours again, as I see Digi has simplified the tech manuals from 155 pages down to 71 pages, and next generation X-CTU software and maybe firmware is better from when I shelved the project last year.
Followup: I rolled back to the old X-CTU (5.2.8.6) and comms work fine to configure the modules.
With the new X-CTU (6.1.2) program, I cannot communicate with the xBee modules. This is because they are configured for 19.2K and even though I select that baud rate, comms don't work.
Using old X-CTU, I tried setting the modules' baud rate back to 9,600 and the new X-CTU works.
Lots of hassle and I can see why Zigbee is failing to catch on, after all these years. Overcomplicated and buggy.
Tried to put in a support ticket with Digi, and they advise I must purchase a pack of support tickets.
Posted my problem in the Digi forums and no response.
Still didn't find a solution to the lost packets problem.
Wifi is looking pretty good.
I tried wifi for a similar purpose, but didn't get anything like 150'. Admittedly, there are several brick walls in the way. My current solution is xBee pros - still in testing but certainly better than my wifi shield.
I have a working weather station at http://scoopjones.us/bakweather/read.php . This is from a box in my apartment using an ATMEL chip (not a full Arduino, which would be more expensive). I have air pressure, temperature and humidity being uploaded to my website elsewhere, and the website uses PHP to parse the data and represent it any number of ways. The box I have is hardwired to a temperature/humidity sensor leading to just outside my window (a shady area). It uploads once every 15 minutes to the site. I didn't use the full Arduino board, as you can do it much more cheaply by buying a $5 chip from Sparkfun and using that in a permanent project. I did, however, have to use an Ethernet Shield to connect to the Internet.
Evan