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Weather Station Hardware => What Weather Station Should I Buy? => Topic started by: aidan on February 15, 2021, 03:20:20 AM
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Hi everyone,
I am rather late to the party here, but having spent the weekend browing various weather station options feel I have at last arrived somewhere where I can get informed and useful advice.
I need a design for an environmental monitoring project for my local community allotment /orchard group. There would be a lot of interest in rain soil and air temperatures it's also an exposed site so wind data would be accurate, yes a weather station.
I can see an educational benefit AC as BC we used to have a lot of school/community group visits to the site.
(after,before covid)
There are a few constraints, as its an eco-friendly place I don't expect a sensor tree or even Davis type sensor would be acceptable. There are no nearby mains supplies electrons and the nearest wi-fi is 200M from my proposed monitoring location, the composting toilet block :-)
Having spent most of this weekend hacking around there is a bewildering number of options none of which seem to quite fit my requirements. I would like to upload near real-time data to the interwebs (inspires interest) and I'm capable of home brew, my hardware is better than my software, need to end up with something reliable and maintainable. I'm thinking of starting with air and soil temps, just requires a module that sleeps for a few mins, takes a reading, transmits it to the toilet node which stores or forwards. Failing a suitable product I know how to do that using a PIC and short range 433/868 MHz band ISM radio
For upload one option is an ISM radio link to the nearest habitation (I know the owners would agree to me sipping a few bytes from their interweb connection).
So can anyone suggest a product which is low power configurable and easy to connect to software to molish it into custom web pages e.g. WEEWX. I'm happy to go down the home brew path if I can start with a design that is mature and supported
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You could look at a remote station option like this from Ecowitt.
https://www.ecowitt.com/shop/goodsDetail/71
Its a solar powered station that connects to the Internet by Cell (GSM), so you'd add a SIM card to get service.
It uploads to the internet your data and also stores it locally.
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Unfortunately though the WS6006 does not support extra sensors.
My question is, "how is a Davis VP2 not eco-friendly?" Seems to me like a VP2 and Enviromonitor fit the requirements.
https://www.davisinstruments.com/enviromonitor/