Smart Weather Station (IoT)

Key questions and caveats

Before I get into the specifics, let’s take a moment to consider the key questions and caveats involved in a project like this:

• How can I create a weather station that it is neither valuable nor attractive to a thief?

• How can I keep hardware costs and development time to the minimum?

• How can I measure and access weather data in real time and display it in a useful way?

Required measurements:

• wind and wind gusts

• wind direction

• rain

• atmospheric pressure

• temperature

• humidity

Connect station to Internet. Store and retrieve local weather data. Communicate between weather station and server.

How can I reduce maintenance to (almost) zero?

• Manage hanging of software

• Manage loss of connectivity

• Manage loss of energy supply

Overview

We will use an MediaTek LinkIt™ Smart 7688 platform, a DHT11, an ESP8266, and ThingSpeak.com for this project. This is a great project to start using the ESP8266 for some basic data logging so let's get started! The ESP8266 based WiFi breakout boards are becoming more popular with Makers due to a low cost and a powerful, programmable microcontroller on-board. The cost is a magnitude lower than solutions including MediaTek LinkIt™ Smart 7688 platform. To quote Make publisher Brian Jepson: “This is inexpensive enough to be very much in the territory of ‘thousands of sensors-launched-out-of-a-cannon’-cheap.”

Couple the ESP8266 with one of the inexpensive DHT series digital temperature and humidity sensors and we have a project that may literally be deployed anywhere to broadcast sensor data. The broadcasting used in this tutorial is using the ESP8266 webserver code and respond to web requests (like in a browser or a web client) to return temperature and humidity data (in a REST type format). This project demonstrates the programming of the ESP8266 ESP-01 module with the MediaTek LinkIt™ Smart 7688 platform and interfacing with a DHT temperature/humidity sensor. Using other sensors and their corresponding libraries, other electronics may be interfaced with the ESP8266 and monitored via WiFi.