Use info from weather station to tell me wind direction and speed

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi,

I'm super new to Arduino, coding, building, all of it. I had an idea for a cool home project: connect the Arduino to a servo or something that has a ship mast and sail, which will point in the direction of the wind. Maybe eventually have a miniature ship that has a turning mainsail or something.

For wind speed, I'm thinking either small LEDs to indicate light, medium, and heavy wind speeds (using Beaufort scale).

What I need help with would be:

  • How can I get the data I need (i.e. wind direction for a specific city, wind speed for a specific city)
  • What's the best way to build the code for someone with no experience writing
  • Are there any major holes in my understanding that this would be a pretty simple project?

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks,
K

2

kingkarnool:

  • How can I get the data I need (i.e. wind direction for a specific city, wind speed for a specific city)

There is no such thing as "the wind speed for a specific city", even less for direction. Wind is highly localised.

What you'll need is either your own wind meter (you can buy those off the shelf), or fetch the data somehow from various weather agencies.

  • What's the best way to build the code for someone with no experience writing
  1. learn coding basics (lots of tutorials out there).
  2. download relevant libraries.
  3. glue it all together with a bit of code.
  • Are there any major holes in my understanding that this would be a pretty simple project?

That it's less simple than you may think: remoteness of sensors adds a huge complication. It also makes any wind data useless for your sailing boat, because that boat needs to now the wind as it is, where it is.

3

Difficult to work out exactly what you're talking about. It sort of sounds like you're trying to make a weather vane that looks like a boat. Is that it?

Anyway you should be able to download current weather data including wind speed/direction from various places on the Internet but AFAIK there's no one place that covers every location in the whole world so you might want to be a bit more specific. Do you plan to make it work for different locations (what's the wind like in city XXX ?) or do you really mean just for your location (wherever that is)?

But as you're needing to connect to the Internet, find and get the appropriate data, then interpret it which may not be exactly straightforward and then convert it into servo positioning and LED lighting (the Beaufort scale has 12 levels) I would say this is not exactly what I would call a "simple project".

It's not completely impossible though and you'd probably have learnt a lot by the time you got it working.

Steve