Hello everyone

Could somebody please direct me to a site where I could find detailed information on how to bubild my own Weather Station. I was thinking just having a wind speed and wind direction devices that run back to my laptop and output values onto a Visual Basic type program. if anybody has experimented or actually built something along the lines of this please let me know. My email address is planesrockmyworld11@hotmail.com and you can PM me too.

Any feedback would be warmly accepted.

Leon, Invercargill
New Zealand

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LEON GIBBS~!

 

Elector electronics over here in the uk did a project article for a stand-alone pic based weather station a couple of years ago. Sadly they will want money. On the bright side there is plenty of free info around on building your own pic based data logger. Of course if you are running the whole show from the laptop then it is simplicity itself as it becomes merely an excercise in interfacing through the parallel or serial port.

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It may seem like a good idea at the time but.. never stir your cold coffee with a soldering iron.

 

Hi Leon,
While you have to sort out the computer side yourself I can give you some idea about the wind speed/ direction instrument I built and which has been running on my roof for about 15 years now.

First, your biggest enemy is rain!
It took me some time to realise that a wind speed instrument that has the rotating cups on top will always leak somewhere and ruin the expensive bearings. So I mounted it hanging down, the rain now runs out of the cup shaft instead of into it.

For bearings you need small, good quality, ball bearings that are open so you can use light (sewing machine) oil for a lubricant. Grease is no good - too much drag, hence sealed bearings are out. The sensor is just a slotted disk with an optical slot sensor, giving you a speed dependent pulse output. The cups were made from turned down tow ball protectors ( plastic), they have lasted well.
BTW, if you cannot machine the parts accurately you will have disappointing results. The rotor needs to be perfectly balanced if its going to stand up to howling winds.

The direction indicator is mounted with the vane on top, it needs to be sturdy as birds will alight on it from time to time. (Magpie proof in my case :wink: ) This uses a servo potentiometer as a sensor. The pot has 360 deg mech rotation and about 350 deg electrical. Only a high quality one will do (and last), I got mine from RS components - it was quite expensive I remember.
You need to arrange a coupling that transmits just rotation but no axial loading to the pot shaft - more mechanical trickery :lol: .
The output from the pot drives cascaded 3914's which in turn drive 16 LED's on a circular display.
I did try reed switches and a rotating magnet for a sensor first - a waste of time as the reed switches failed regularly.

The wind speed sensor needs calibration, sitting in the back of a ute on a windless night might work but sounds dangerous. I built a small wind tunnel, using an old multi speed tangential fan, and borrowed an accurate hand held anemometer to get the figures.

Good luck, its more of a mechanical challenge than an electronic one. Worry about your computer interface once you passed this first hurdle, its not an easy one :wink:
Klaus

 

Have you searched Google for "diy weather station" and "homemade weather station" (without the " ")? I got lots of hits.