About

Hi, there !

I’ve created this “blog” mainly for my own use. Just as a place to store information relevant for my experiments with “displays, sensors, electronics, software and weather APis” for my weather station project. If, against all odds, someone else out there actually finds this “blog” useful, feel free to leave a comment in the comments field.

History

Several years I’ve wanted to build my own weather station. I know that there are a lot of commercial weather stations available, a lot of weather applications on ipad, iphone, androids etc. I also know that designing my own will (probably) be more expensive that just buying one.

Prototype with arduino, display and sensors

However, designing my own gives me the chance to get exactly the look and feel I want, exactly the size I want, collecting exactly the data I want. And: It’s a perfect goal for experimenting with microcontrollers, sensors, wireless communication, displays, solar stuff, power, weather API’s etc.

This blog was created after “finishing” prototype hardware and software that you can read about in the Prototype menu. You can read about future plans in the NextGen menu and their submenues.

Goal

I want my weatherstation to:

• have “large” screen (3″ – 7″ ?) of good quality
• show current time and date
• show indoor and outdoor temperature, pressure and humidity
• use internal and wireless external sensors
• be internet enabled (wifi)
• show weather forecast
• show sunset/sunrise time and moon phases
• Be as thin as possible and look nice/ok
• Be possible to hang on the wall and/or stand on a table
• (Proximity aware)
• (Have a webserver for remote readout of data)

I’ll probably accept that it needs to be power by usb or something. Maybe solar/lipo is possible but it’s not the highest priority.

All information I collect in this blog will be focused on that goal. The first thing that come to your mind might be “why not use an ipad or something”. Good question. I don’t have a good answer. It would probably be faster, cheaper (and better). But I wouldn’t have learned so much on the way. The learning and experimenting is the most important part of this project 🙂

Let’s see how far it’s possible to go. And how long it takes before I drop this project and start on another one…

Update frequency

Don’t expect the blog entries to be updated very often. The information under the menues and submenues are updated more often, but without any notice.