Hi! This is my first post here and I hope it's in the right place. I'm currently using a Particle Photon to drive a Sparkfun Weather Shield to run my back yard weather station. Although it generally works I've had a lot of problems with the Photon and its associated IDE. It's becoming more trouble than it's worth. I'd like to move on to something that's less of a bother.
Sparkfun makes a version of their Weather Shield that runs on Arduino. However, there's lot of different Arduinos. After browsing the subject, I'm now completely confused. Can anyone give me a suggestion for an Arduino that can functionally replace a Particle Photon? I need something that will support wi-fi and Bluetooth, be programmable over wi-fi (so I don't have to bring the thing indoors from the back yard every time I want to change something), and have reasonable power demands (so I can run it from a solar panel), around 50 ma. would be nice.
Is there an Arduino that matches these desires? Thanks!
You may be able to re-use your photon weather shield by making a daughter-board that plugs in instead of the photon.
If I were designing my weather station now, and I may redesign it anyway, I would not use WiFi or Bluetooth. I would use LoRa. I would use a bare atmega328 and an rfm95 module. The whole thing could run for years on batteries. If you are in range of an existing LoRa gateway, it's easy and probably free (most gateways are run by enthusiasts and are open). If not, it's easy and cheap to build your own single channel gateway.
Wow, your weather station is really nicely done! Depending on which processor I get to replace the Photon, a daughterboard might make sense. But I'd like to continue using the old one while I'm building something new so I might as well just get the Sparkfun Arduino version.
My current arrangement was largely dictated by the original choice of the Sparkfun Weather Shield plus the Photon, but it's proving sub-optimal. Right now I need a wi-fi connection because my setup pulls various API data from the web, like sunrise/sunset times, forecasts, and news headlines. The Bluetooth is needed to connect the station to my Nextion display indoors.
But I see what you're saying (I think). Instead of having all the procesing going on outdoors with a simple Bluetooth link to a stand-alone display indoors, why not have just the minimum amount of processing outdoors needed to gather sensor data and send only that to a more powerful processor indoorswhich could live in the same box as the display. The indoor processor could then drive the display and handle the API calls, etc. That would drastically cut my outdoor power requirements. Hmm...