Vaisala Environment Measurement System With Arduino

Hey!

I've been digging electronic waste at my work, and this is what I've gathered so far:

WID512 Data Panel Display
WAC151 Crossarm with WAA151 wind speed sensor & WAV151 wind direction sensor
HMT120 Humidity & Temperature Transmitter
HMW93 Humidity & Temperature Transmitter

So, I have been planning to create a environment measurement system. The data display would be located in vestibule and there you could check the weather outside and room specific measurements. Biggest question of all is how i gather the data from the sensors and send the data out to the WID512 display.
Is there a Arduino product that could do this?
The main target is to get the wind sensors to work,
Here is some technical data:

WAA151:
Output 0...75m/s = 0...750Hz square wave

WAV151:
Output: 6-bit parallel GRAY-code

WID512:
Input: Generic Mode Message Format (Ethernet, RS-485, RS-232)

So, is there an Arduino product that can measure signal frequencies accurately? Is it capable of reading both, the signal frequency and 6-bit parallel code? And if there is more sensors coming later, how do i connect them?

Im going to update this as the project moves on.

If you have any suggestions, ideas or experiences, please leave a comment!

Welcome to the forum Stemuli.
I can't help directly with those particular sensors, but I have used Vaisala sensors now for many years in my industrial control and monitoring projects.

In early days I have interfaced a variety of Vaisala weather instruments as used in vineyards to SCADA systems, where I needed to write the low level communications between Vaisala logger and existing SCADA systems. Once I knew what the data protocol was, it was a simple task of writing the routines to be able to transfer the data across.

I still work with this high quality gear, and currently have an array of Vaisala sensors and, vNet data loggers and their specific viewLinc software on the bench as I write. Expensive at a tad over $40k cost price for this small research project, but that is the price for quality from Finland.

I don't see any real difficulties in interfacing to those sensors using an Arduino.
As a suggestion, you might like to look at using an Arduino Mega with Ethernet on-board, such as the Ether-Mega from Freetronics. I have used these on many occasions and in industrial situations and they are well built.

Using an Ether-Mega, you will have plenty of I/O to play with.
I think the HMT120 will have standard industrial interfaces of 4-20mA and maybe a voltage based interface as well. You can quite easily interface this back to the analog input of your Arduino using a few parts.

For the display, that may take some extra work, especially if the data protocol is not published by Vaisala.

I will be interested to watch how you progress.


Paul

Hi Paul!

Thank you for your reply.

I'm actually working with the data logger series and vNets. Glad to hear that you are pleased with the quality Vaisala can provide.

I think I'm starting off without the data display and make the Arduino to write a log file to a SD card. Looks like Ethernet shield is the easiest way to connect a SD card reader.

I'm a novice when it comes to C++ programming(Studying the language at the moment) so this project is going to take a while.