Weather Station

Projects General Guidance
1

For my first project, I’m looking to build an Arduino-powered weather station for my home. So far, the design consists of two parts: an outdoor module and an indoor module.

Both modules will be able to:
Measure temperature
Measure humidity
Measure barometric pressure

The outdoor module will be able to:
Send its measurements to the indoor module
Withstand weather and other adverse conditions
Be powered by battery, possibly with a solar assist

The indoor module will be able to:
Display measurements from both modules via an LCD
Preferably with a button to switch between the display of indoor and outdoor measurements
Provide current measurements to users via a web server over wifi
Submit historical measurements to an online service for trending and graphing
Be powered by a wall plug

As far as parts go, I’ve figured on:

Indoor station

Outdoor station

  • Arduino Micro
  • This station will be battery powered, so I’d like something smaller and less powerful for this station. I also only don't need to utilize WiFi or a display so I don’t need a ton of pins, only enough for the XBee and weather sensors.
  • I can’t use the XBee shield (or at least, I don’t think I can…), so I think I’ll have to wire up the XBee module right to the Micro.
  • I’m not sure what I’d need for power. Would a standard set of AA batteries or a 9v work here? Would I be better of with a lithium polymer battery? It gets fairly cold here during winter so I’d like something that’s not going to totally die in the winter time.

Weather sensors

I don’t have any firm ideas about cases for either station. I like this one (http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-weather-station/step10/Buidling-the-Transmitter/) for the outdoor station, and this one (http://www.instructables.com/id/Plotly-Arduino-Data-Visualization/step4/Building-the-Enclosures/) for the indoor station, although I would like it to actually surround the components entirely.

Is this feasible given the parts I’ve chosen and the assumptions I've made ? Is there anything I should substitute in place of what I have here?

2

I did a similar project using Jeenodes. Wireless and Arduino all in one. http://moderndevice.com/product/jeenode-v6-kit/
Dead simple to use. Jeenodes Weather | Electric Projects
Right now, mine just goes to an LCD screen, but there is a Jeenode on a USB stick so you can get the data into your computer.

I have my outdoor sensors in a plastic box inside a Stevenson Shield - Stevenson screen - Wikipedia
The inside LCD screen & Jeenode are in an old cigar box.

Looks like you have done some research. I'm not sure how a WiFi shield and an Xbee would work on one Arduino.
Make sure to check for any pin conflict on all the items you want to add. I would start with sensors first and get them to work, then work on getting the LCD screen to work next, then worry about other stuff later.
Good luck.

3

That's a good thought. If the shields interfere with each other, I might have to move the Wifi as a breakout board instead. If their antennas interfere, then maybe I'll need one or more external antennas.

4

There is a near identical project on openhomeautomation.net in which it uses xively to host all your data. I highly recommend the tutorial as it is very easy to follow and results in an excellent finish product. on the xively website is a similar tutorial.

5

Check these out, too
http://lowpowerlab.com/blog/category/moteino/