Weather components?

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi, i have been doing some searching for a few hours now trying to find (initially) a cheap Anemometer/wind speed sensor and have been surprised how hard im finding it?

I have found some such as the indeed vortex sensor which I see some have used, but at £50-£60 (in uk) this is still on the expensive side.

I then found the sparkfun weather meter kit which has a nice array of sensors, but this seems to be no where in-stock, anywhere? Nor can i find the individual sensors?

I can find plenty of cheapish weather station products that come with the sensors, but im simply wanting to buy sensors (or mainly wind speed & direction) that has no station as i want to integrate them into my arduino.

Am i searching using the wong phrase? Does anyone know of cheap wind sensors that i can use with an arduino? (i thought ebay would be full of these?)

Thanks
Andy

2

A simple sensor like this maybe. Or buy something like this and hack the wireless protocol to read from your arduino.

3

Hi Riva, sorry i should have mentioned i had seen this sensor and it does seem viable (cost wise) but as i cant find anything about im not sure how I would use it iwth arduino (its still a learning curve for me) so didnt want to buy without knowing first.

The other option you said is nice and again i had seen it, and to be honest im sure the weather sensors are that of the sparkfun ones, but this is a prototype im trying to maybe eventually commercialise it (probable never happen) so the idea of hacking another product doesnt really seem viable?

Thanks for responding.
Andy

4

gibbon:
Hi Riva, sorry i should have mentioned i had seen this sensor and it does seem viable (cost wise) but as i cant find anything about im not sure how I would use it iwth arduino (its still a learning curve for me) so didnt want to buy without knowing first.
The cable coming from the sensor is probably 2 wires connected to a magnetic reed switch mounted on the main (fixed) body. The spinning part would have a magnet that closes this switch once per revolution. Goggle for 'Arduino reed switch' returns plenty of examples of how to interface to the Arduino

The other option you said is nice and again i had seen it, and to be honest im sure the weather sensors are that of the sparkfun ones, but this is a prototype im trying to maybe eventually commercialise it (probable never happen) so the idea of hacking another product doesnt really seem viable?
Unless you will be designing and building your own sensors then you have to buy them from somewhere! The various sensors all connect to a tiny microcontroller/RF transmitter so you could either cut the wires and feed them to your Arduino to decode & send/transmit or decode the supplied transmitter signal and use an Arduino to do something with it.