Weather Station Project

Setting up a weather station has never been so easy....., well I mean a Personal Weather Station (PWS) of course. For a professional one which has high accuracy and reliability, such weather station could be expensive with instrumental data critical to inform decisions and actions.

Thanks to the support from School of Education, we acquired a VEVOR 7-in-1 Wi-Fi Weather Station, 7" TFT Color Display, Wireless Weather Station with Solar-Powered Sensor, Indoor Outdoor Monitoring for Temperature, Humidity, Wind Speed Direction, and Rainfall. 

This PWS is installed at B Block Level 2 Courtyard near the Rolling Vertical Farm, aiming to record micro-climate data for the farm over a long period of time. 

After setting up both the PWS outdoors and the console display indoor, I learnt that there are two major cloud services that this unit supports, or could be the other way around to say that two free weather cloud services support this weather station:

• Weather Underground - https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IBRISB5839 

• WeatherCloud - https://app.weathercloud.net/ 

I was truly amazed that there are so many PWS setup in the world from just these two weather cloud services. You can pretty much find weather data everywhere in the world from these two and you do not really need to have one PWS at home, unless you want to collect own data for some purposes. 

Both cloud services collect/display real-time weather data (I set every five minutes interval for one data transmission) and time series data on their websites.  WeatherCloud supports weather data download for up to one year, while Weather Underground does not provide data download. However, the Weather Underground provides APIs for downloading current and historical data. With the help of ChatGPT, I was able to create a shell script on a Raspberry Pi to grab weather data and send as telemetry data to my Thingsboard. Please contact me if you are interested in knowing more about Thingsboard, Raspberry Pi and the script. Below is a dashboard in my Thingboard that display live this Vertical Farm - KG - QUT - IBRISB5839 data.

Weather and Climate are important and fun topics for science and mathematics.  A weather station with sensors can provide ideas and contexts for many STEM integrated maker projects.  At MakerClubQUT, we have projects that involve the use of weather sensors. For example,

• IoT: Plant Environment Monitoring project has temperature, humidity and air pressure (barometer) sensors.

• Auto Rain Gauge project could measure and record rainfall utilising a Reed sensor (switch). 

For measuring solar radiation and UV index, we have GUVA-S12SD UV Sensor but no project has been created yet,

For measuring wind direction and speed, it is called an Anemometer.  An anemometer also measures air pressure, which has a dedicated barometer sensor, but for wind speed and direction, it requires some design and sensors such as compass and hall sensors to achieve. 

There are many educational activities that could be designed from this Personal Weather Station (PWS). I could quickly name some:

• Reading the weather data - what are the units of these data? do they have a range? how to interpret them?

• Analyse the weather data - what patterns do they have? are there any trends in certain period of time such as day, week, month, season, year?

• Apply the data - can we utilise the data to inform the operation of the Vertical Farm? How to improve automation such as when the temperature is higher than xx, send an alert to xx and activate xx?

What else do you have in mind?