Automated Home Weather Station (Satellite Image Collector)

hi and welcome back to the save it for parts channel in this video i'll be building an automated home weather station using a raspberry pi computer some satellite radio equipment and hopefully some basic weather or environmental instruments if you saw some of my previous videos you might recognize what we're up to out here we've got the homemade tv rabbiteers set up and we're listening for weather satellites now if you did pay attention to my previous videos you might be wondering where's my fancy qfh egg beater antenna that i made in a previous one well there was a violent windstorm and it fell off the roof so it's a little smashed up right now i need to rebuild it anyway i don't think the tuning was quite right and it never quite worked the way i hoped it would okay so my qfh antenna here it's kind of garbage i put it together in a hurry it worked for a while now it doesn't work and try to build a better one actually using some copper coil got some angle fittings and i've got a guide from us radio guys website that shows how to do this a little [Music] better [Music] [Music] all right well this thing is not perfect but it's a lot better than the last one this is looking a lot more like a space egg beater i just picked up this raspberry pi 4 which is the next version up from the threes that i've been using and it looks about the same it's just a little bit faster and i think the specs are a little bit better so i might end up using this for my weather system okay we're setting up the rtl sdr drivers and software on the raspberry pi this system will just start recording when the satellite passes overhead it will process that recording into a weather map and it will output it into a folder as usual i will put the links to all the walk-through guides for how i did this on the description below so you can check it out for yourself now one thing i am doing slightly differently from the walkthrough guide that i used is to add this dash t flag into my code and that will enable the bias t or the external power from the rtl dongle and what that means is that it will power an external device in my case the sauber noah lna and that little lna is a combination filter and amplifier that's going to make the signal a lot stronger and cleaner for this application now i think my filter took some damage when the antenna fell over so i'm gonna have to open this up and uh maybe do some soldering because something's loose now okay the little led module is definitely loose and i think that my sma connector is a little loose so let's see if i can tack those down better so putting everything right here at the antenna is supposed to be best for optimizing signal strength and minimizing line loss of any antenna cables so i still need an ethernet cord and a power supply for the raspberry pi and then i'm also hoping to put some other weather instruments in and around this box so the pie can provide not just satellite weather pictures but some real time on the ground weather information as well okay so i'm getting pretty good coverage east and west but my north and south coverage is still really bad so i found a few other tricks i can try like putting the sdr directly onto the raspberry pi instead of with an extension usb that means i'm going to need a bigger waterproof box so that everything fits in there so my little waterproof box is not big enough to directly plug in the sdr to the pie because it just doesn't fit so i want one slightly bigger i don't have one slightly bigger i've got one really big and this was free so i don't care if i use it for this project it's a little too big honestly but maybe i can stuff some other equipment in here in the future [Music] do [Music] all right i've got my new and improved antenna with new and improved electronics box got our raspberry pi our sdr dc filter because we're now powering the lna with usb from down here and we've got a little 12-volt fan so the fresh air comes in here hot air goes out the bottom or at least that's the idea and then i've covered the entire thing in foil tape to try to make it shed heat a little better because it's just going to be up here in the sun and that black plastic would otherwise soak up heat and probably overheat my electronics so hopefully between the tin foil coating and the little fan this will stay nice and cool all summer all right so i am getting some good images off of that satellite system and i'm getting a little bit more north-south coverage for good passes but i'm still not satisfied i feel like i was getting a lot more coverage into canada before i'm going to go ahead and add one more amplifier in the circuit along the way i'm going to power this with the bias t have the other amp powered with usb and i have that dc blocker in between them and maybe that will give me even more signal okay we're going to re-enable that bias t that i disabled when i was going with usb power so now when this script runs it'll turn on the bias t do the reception and then turn it off again afterwards all right so i've left my weather system running all day and we've got a few example images got the thermal like this and some of the regular visible light imagery i'm noticing um it's really inconsistent i'm using the command line version of wx to image and some of the images are this you know really nice high coverage there's a lot of north south coverage on it and some of them are very small for passes that should be just about as good they are not getting as much north-south coverage and then some of them have really terrible coverage but then it includes all the static at the beginning and end normally it crops that out but i don't know why in some cases it decides to keep the static and in some cases it decides to crop it i'm also not getting a precipitation data out of this command line wxt image this is supposed to be the msa version with precipitation and does not seem to be working if i pull it up in desktop wxd image i'm actually getting those false colored areas showing where it's raining or snowing all right we're going to try the russian satellite while we've got this all set up so it wasn't really the best time to be looking at this satellite but the quality and uh the quantity of image that i got from meteor this time is a little better than last time so i guess i'm pretty happy with this new antenna can zoom in on lake winnipeg there up in canada all right so i played around with automating this even further and i found someone's project online called raspberry noah v2 i did try the v1 version but this one is a little slicker and it seems to work a little better so this actually schedules the upcoming passes shows you the passes with details and actually shows you a little map of what those passes look like built right into a web panel so that's cool and then you can go over your captures and it creates a database of each captured image and then it generates uh different enhancements through the wx2 image so you can get your precipitation you can get your infrared and you can get all the different enhancements that you would normally get it also gives you this little spectrogram which is cool and that shows you the signal strength of the noaa signal as it comes in mine's a little washed out in the middle i might need to actually turn down my gain because i am running two lnas so i might be getting too much gain at the highest point of the pass i'm not sure what happened with this one i'm getting this weird banding interference and i'm also getting some of these that don't automatically crop i don't know what the difference is between the ones that do and don't automatically crop in here and i'm still not getting anything for meteor um my spectrogram looks pretty empty i'm not sure what happened here maybe i need to tweak the gain again but we'll play around with that some more so you can find this automated script and the web panel on github under jack hokey raspberry noah v2 i apologize if i'm mispronouncing the name of the coder it's pretty useful it's fairly straightforward to set up i did still have to manually enable my bias t as i'm still having some issues with that but once i got that going it seems to be working pretty smoothly all right so i spent so much time uh tweaking and debugging these satellite downloads that i haven't actually bought or installed any environmental sensors on my supposed weather station it's a little slow to do any changes or tweaks with these noaa satellites since they only come over twice a day you see an issue you do your updates and you have to wait 12 hours for the next set of passes so i'm going to stop this video now we're going to come back to this once i do get some environmental sensors and i'm going to update the web panel or modify it a little bit so i have some of the environmental data some of the climate data maybe a webcam maybe some other stuff that i can throw in there and make more of an all-in-one weather station thanks for sticking with me so far through this and make sure to like and subscribe so you stay tuned for the next one we'll see you next time you

Channel: saveitforparts

Views: 64,965

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Id: WM99A1uUprQ

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021