Arduino Weather Station - Internet of Things and the Particle Photon

I don't know if it's that I work in an office full of civil engineers or this is just part of becoming an adult but it seems like about 75% of the conversations I have center around the weather and can I just say that I love that because I love weather after a particularly heavy rainstorm I not only know but am prepared to discuss at length the rainfall totals across the region if the levels in the surrounding lakes rose which creeks reach flood stage and all the associated hydraulic and hydrologic minutia so when I got interested in web-enabled electronics the Internet of Things so they say I knew immediately that my first project would be related to the first thing I do when I log on to my computer at work each day check the weather this is not necessarily a how-to video but of course I'll show you how I did it just keep in mind if you're taking advice about meteorology or web development from a civil engineer you might as well be asking an accountant to flush your radiator the brains of the project is a particle photon which is pretty much a tiny Arduino with a Wi-Fi chip but your $20 buys a lot more than the hardware because the photon has its own online IDE and uses a cloud-based service from particle to interact with the web and getting this to work isn't that straightforward particle is a start-up company so they haven't quite got all the creature comforts and layers of abstraction that we begin our electronics hobbyists have grown to expect to get the right files uploaded to the quote/unquote cloud you have to install about 10 gigabytes of additional development tools just so you can use the command prompt as an interface and I came very close to giving up all together and just loading the organ trail since I was already stepping back to 1993 but I finally got everything working and when you actually take a step back from this the code is very straightforward there's a link in the description if you want to have a look the actual weather station is made of a scrap of walnut I cut this to size and then plane down to the thickness I wanted then I drilled out for the panel meters I put a chamfer around the edges and then put a few coats of tung oil as a finish the panel meters have custom faces that I designed a draft sight which is a free CAD program I just cut these out by hand and glued them on to the meters with spray adhesive I have a meter for air temperature relative humidity barometric pressure precipitation chance and wind speed I also have a couple of LEDs which light up if there's any kind of alert thunderstorm watch wind chill advisory not alert etc there is really no circuitry here the panel meters use one milliamp at full scale so they can be connected directly to the signal pins on the dev board and I use trim pots as current limiting resistors to get them perfectly calibrated everything fit together really nicely on a piece of perf board and I just hot glued this to the back of the station here's the gist of how this works at least as far as I can understand the photon publishes an event when it would like to know the current weather conditions this triggers a web hook which is stored on the cloud to make an API call to forecast I owe the API returns data in JSON format the web hook contains a template to parse the json data using mustache then sends it to the photon finally the photon deconstructs this data into the individual values and converts them into pulse width modulated signals for the five panel meters and the alert LED this is all true I didn't make any of those words up and I think this project turned out pretty slick but honestly unless your current pastime is getting kicked by strangers or something equally as demoralizing I can't recommend web development as a hobby at all if you do decide to take on a project like this I hope at least this video gives you hope that there's a light at the end of the tunnel even if it's warning you of a tornado thanks for watching and let me know what you think by the way November is men's health awareness month life expectancy for men is around five years shorter than for women mainly due to the fact that we're more reckless with our physical and mental health if you haven't been to the doctor for a while schedule a physical you could find something that saves your life and if you feel that you might be suffering from depression or another mental health issue I encourage you to tell a doctor even if it's just your family physician a mood disorder isn't part of who you are it's just a disease like the flu and there's a lot of treatment options available

Channel: Practical Engineering

Views: 82,652

Keywords: Weather Station, Internet Of Things (Industry), arduino weather station, particle photon, panel meter

Id: m_QQrMqQb04

Length: 5min 17sec (317 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2015