Weather Station Kit with Solar Panel

The hobbyist will enjoy assembling and recreating a weather station from DFRobot with this fully equipped kit. You should plan around 2 hours for this to deal with the contents of the well-sorted box, to download the illustrated instructions and the Arduino codes and libraries. You can see also the attached files. All what you need is under the topic "Documents" to find: Weather Station Kit with Solar Panel-DFRobot.

The structure of the components is based on an Arduino "Palette Board" engineered by DFRobot (which is addressed as LilyPad Arduino USB in the Arduino IDE) and 2 sensors: the DHT11 and the BMP280. All other components such as jumpers, breadboards, solar panels, DS3231, LiPo, touch sensors are brought together in a perfectly punched 3 mm balsa wood.

This is in the box:

Each individual object is well packed and, above all, provided with a SKU code so that individual parts can also be reordered if necessary.

Today at noon, followed the instructions and first adjusted the DS3231 clock, assembling the other components step by step according to the instructions. Using the Arduino IDE 1.8.19, installed the prepared libraries in the Arduino folder and uploaded the available example to the Arduino palette board. It works by itself and has led to success straight away: the LCD screen is activated by touching the touch sensor and displays the current information for a few seconds.

Remember that the information shown, such as date, time, temperature, humidity and air pressure, does not move to a database for storage or analysis via Bluetooth or WLAN, but is a snapshot.

So it still offers options for expansion: this also includes the idea of ​​expanding the Palette Board with an Air Quality Sensor and a Dust Adapter from Sharp. The example code is already prepared for this - thank you very much, DFRobot!

A further improvement would be an outside temperature sensor connected to radio waves (as example): in addition to measuring the inside temperature, this would also have the outside temperature.

During this dark season of the year, the battery level can be exhausted, so that you can also supply the Arduino Palette Board with constant power via the USB connection. You can conveniently lead the USB cable inside to the device on the side walls.

If the information collected is still not enough, the DHT11 and BMP280 sensors can also be exchanged for a BME680: this would result in Temperature, Humidity, Pressure and Gas.

The applied aluminum foil is intended to protect the components from overheating and to prevent the measurement result from being falsified.The solar panel, which charges the LiPo, is applied.