We bring to your attention a method of making a weather station for a house or summer cottage. We will take the Arduino board and a set of sensors as a basis: temperature, humidity, pressure and a carbon dioxide sensor. The data will be displayed on the LCD display, and power will be supplied from a power supply for a mobile phone or batteries.
Necessary
- - Arduino board or analog;
- - DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor;
- - BMP085 pressure sensor;
- - carbon dioxide sensor MQ135;
- - LCD display 1602;
- - potentiometer 10 kOhm;
- - building for the weather station;
- - a piece of foil-clad fiberglass;
- - screws for fastening components;
- - computer;
- - connecting wires;
- - connector for power supply;
- - soldering iron.
Instructions
Step 1
First you need to find a suitable case. All the components of the future room weather station should fit there. These housings are sold in many electronics stores. Or use any other corpus you can find.
Think about how all the components will fit inside. Cut through the window to secure the LCD display if not available. If you place a carbon dioxide sensor inside, which heats up quite strongly, then place it on the opposite side from the other sensors or make it remote. Provide a hole for the power connector.
Step 2
A few words about the components used.
The 1602 LCD uses 6 Arduino pins + 4 for power (backlight and CG).
DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor is connected to any digital pin. To read the values, we will use the DHT11.rar library, which can be downloaded, for example, here:
The BMP085 pressure sensor is connected via the I2C interface to two pins of the Arduino: SDA - to the analog pin A4 and SCL - to the analog pin A5. Please note that +3, 3 V voltage is supplied to the sensor.
The MQ135 carbon dioxide sensor is connected to one analog pin.
In principle, to assess the meteorological situation, it is enough to have data on temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure, and a carbon dioxide sensor is not necessary.
But using all 3 sensors, we will have 7 digital and 3 analog pins of the Arduino involved. Well, food, of course.
Step 3
The diagram of the weather station is shown in the figure. Everything is clear here.
Step 4
Let's write a sketch for Arduino. The text of the program, due to its considerable size, is given as a link in the appendix to the article in the "Sources" section. All code is provided with detailed and understandable comments.
Load the sketch into the memory of the Arduino board controller.
Step 5
We will make a printed circuit board for placing components inside the case - this is the most convenient solution for arranging and connecting sensors. To make a printed circuit board at home, I use "laser-ironing" technology (we described it in detail in previous articles) and etching with citric acid. We will provide places on the board for jumpers ("jumpers") in order to be able to disable the sensors. This will be useful if you need to reprogram the microcontroller when you want to modify the program.
Using soldering, we will install pressure and gas sensors.
To install the Arduino Nano board, it is convenient to use special adapters or sockets with a pitch of 2, 54. But in the absence of these parts and because of space saving inside the case, I will also install the Arduino by soldering.
The thermal sensor will be located at some distance from the board and will be thermally insulated from the interior of the weather station using a special insulating pad.
We will provide places for connecting external power to our homemade board. I will be using a regular 5V charger from an old broken router. Plus 5 volts from the charger will be fed to the Vin pin of the Arduino board.
The LCD screen will be screwed directly to the case at the front. It will be connected by wires with "Dupont" type connectors.
Step 6
Place the PCB inside the case and secure it with screws. Let's connect the LCD screen to the Arduino legs according to the diagram.
Carefully close the body of the weather station.
Step 7
Having double-checked that everything was connected correctly, we supply power to our weather station. The LCD screen should light up and after a few seconds it will display pressure data, a small forecast based on pressure readings, and temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide readings.
