About two years ago I started thinking about weather stations. Just over a year ago I received a Raspberry Pi 2 and began collecting the bits needed. While it is easy enough to purchase off-the-shelf stations for reasonable (to me) money, but the time you collect, log and publish the data there can be serious money involved. Knowing that I could get mechanical sensors to measure Pressure, Temperature, Rain fall, Wind speed and Wind Direction; then take periodic photos to be published for cheap money, I decided to get serious about the electronics.
Understanding the I/O of a RPi was a *real* challenge. I began last fall trying to get my RPi to read the sensors I bought with mixed success. After spending two days reading and re-reading, I discovered that jumping from system purchase to installing a 3rd party software like WeeWx was fool-hearty at best - KISS is the rule!
Last weekend I made huge headway after stumbling on a WXF member's post about his WeeWx system, that pointed me not only to the code for the tipping bucket, but more importantly to a "How To" of GPIOs on the RPi. There have been a number of changes in the two odd years since I got my RPi, and jumping to the latest version of Python was a BIG MISTAKE. Now that I have an editor that I like (Geany) and understand that Python 2.x.x will work with my hardware and 3.anything will NOT, I have data!
My set-up looks something like:
RPi2 (Jessie, GPIO ZERO v1.4)
BME280 by Adafruit for Temperature (T), Barometric Pressure (P), Humidity (Rh) connected via I2C
HMC5883L by Adafruit for Wind Direction (WD), also connected via I2C
WS-1080-WC as the Anemometer (WS), connected to GPIO #12
WS-2080-RC for the tipping bucket Rain Gauge (RG) to GPIO #21
So far, I have the i2C stuff working using Python scripts that I found, some linked from WXF!. I do not have the final adjustments completed as the system is still in the early validation stages, but I can read both I2C sensors and see each bucket tip of the rain gauge.
I will try and attached a couple photos for reference.
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