Building a Custom Wireless Weather Station (Arduino)

what's up guys welcome to my Channel today we're going to be building a fully remote weather station complete with a 3D printed receiver module that receives all of the data packets wirelessly it then passes that data to the computer onto a custom GUI to get more detailed information and live data and to address the elephant in the room yes this is the indoor temperature and yes my AC is out in this room yeah so getting into the design process the material 6061 was chosen for pretty much all the mechanical structure the reason being is that I feel like I I wanted to get more experience on CNC using that material so everything was built around a 1010 t-slot Extrusion Rod the reason for that is just to make it more modular there's a ton of aftermarket stuff for that there's a ton of attachment so it was pretty easy to come up with ways to bolt it all together in this case we're using just three arms there is another empty face so we could add another sensor or we could design the arms to hold multiple sensors like the back arm that holds the rain gauge on top and then it has a bracket coming down to hold the Stevenson screen so the arms the triangle shape is called ISO grading it's a real technique used in rocket industry the car industry pretty much everywhere everywhere uses it because it's a way to keep the strength of the part really high but lose a ton of weight in this case we're doing it to remove a ton of surface area but keep the strength of the part and the reason why we're removing the surface area is because when the wind affects that part it's looking for the the surface area as part of the equation so by reducing the surface area we can essentially have a higher wind velocity than if we were to not do any of the iso reading so here's a sectional analysis of the Stevenson screen um you can see that it's kind of like ring stacked on top of each other but it still allows air to move through the reason for this is we don't want wind to directly interfere with our sensors because that will put noise in the barometric pressure sensor and then it's also enclosed for where the temperature and humidity sensor is because we don't want the sun to directly hit on the sensors so let's jump into the 3D printer software I'm using ultimaker cure here and I have a creality inner three that I'm printing on for those of you don't know uh 3D printing works by having a spool of plastic at the top that feeds it down into the hot end and it kind of extra melts it and extrudes it out layer by layer um this process is pretty slow I think each of these parts were around eight hours with the top of the Stevenson screen being around 30 hours uh playing with the settings uh these I did around 20 and filled with the gyroid pattern uh just on standard quality [Music] thank you foreign [Music] so let's jump back into Fusion 360 one more time uh this this we're going to be going over the cam process or setting up our stock to Mill out each one of these parts in total there was seven parts that had to be machined this CNC it can do aluminum it isn't necessarily made for aluminum so each part was pretty slow each of the arms were like uh two hours two and a half hours total and then the adapter plates were around an hour total for each part but yeah I set my parts up and they all pretty much ran the same uh operations of facing and then flipping and then facing to give me a true parallel and a true thickness of the part next operation would be roughing pocketing finishing the inside and then I would cut out the part with a roughing pass and then finishing pass on the outside again it's always important to check your tool pass with simulation especially with aluminum because we did break three or four MLS trying to get the speeds and feed styled and all of these parts were fixture to the CNC bed using a blue masking tape and then super glue sandwiched in the middle it holds the parts really well you don't have to worry about running into any clamps on the side of your part that way you can get a full clean face and then these next couple of Clips are going to be the actual sounds of the machine running that way you can kind of get an idea of how these speeds and feeds may sound on your machine or on this machine if you're if you're looking at router cnts I also post the speeds and feeds up on the screen foreign [Laughter] foreign [Music] now that we got the parts manufactured it's time to move on to the assembly and the electronics so for the assembly the first thing I'm going to do is hand chain for the edges that the CNC machine couldn't get and then I'm going to tap the holes where the corner brackets are going to mount to these are tap with quarter 20. the t-slotted rail mounts onto an adapter plate that is tapped for 3 8 by 16 and that's what screws onto the tripod and then from there at the top of that rail is where our other brackets for the wind direction wind speed and then the rain gauge will Mount onto once I got everything assembled on the tripod I then fastened the wires neatly onto the weather station and on the tripod because everything's going to come down and permanent into a main electrical box down at the bottom now it's left is to attach some of these wires check out all the sensors we got the wind direction sensor rain sensor wind speed sensor and then inside the Stevenson screen here we have temperature and humidity and pressure and lightning strike counter so let's get these wired up there's three main electrical boards on this weather station you have the Stevenson screen electrical board it's going to have a temperature a pressure humidity a lightning strike and a light sensor on board on the tripod legs is where the main controller board is mounted is where it passes the data wirelessly inside there is where the the Arduino Nano will live we have a real-time clock module an SD card that we logged data to every 30 seconds and then we have an NRF 2401 that's the actual device that is passing data over a 2.4 gigahertz band it sends the data in 32 byte packets that we are sending at about 100 milliseconds so the data is not truly live coming in on the receiver side but it's fast enough to give us a smooth GUI what you see on my phone when wiring up the Arduino Nano is I put all the pin outs in a Google doc and then as I go through a check each sensor off by color so you'll see the finished one everything's green good to go all the sensors checked out now the probably the coolest sensor that I want to cover is this rain gauge sensor it acts like a tipping bucket sensor which a typical tip and bucket normally has a known volume with a pivot point at the bottom and then it'll once it fills up it'll it'll shift to one side and trigger a limit switch that you have tied to an interrupt in your computer and then as the rain fills it back up it'll tip to the other side and it tip back and forth well in this case I didn't want to have any mechanical Parts on board or anything that could rush so I went with this laser tipping bucket and the way it works is it has laser that will bounce around in the inside these are infrared lasers and it has receivers there's and it's measuring the intensity of the infrared lasers and then so what will happen is as the rain comes down you'll get droplets on the Dome and then the infrared lasers will refract out and not make it back to the receiver and then so the intensity that it's getting measured of infrared beams goes down the rain gauge has a built-in algorithms that they have come up with to detect like it's it's a certain amount of rainfall in this case we have it set to a tenth of an inch and it'll trigger the relay the way we wire it up is there's 12 volts as the power source that powers their PCB and then there's a relay connection which we send five volts up there because the Arduino Nano is 5 volt tolerant so we send five volts up and then on the normally open contact comes back to an interrupt signal to keep the signal from floating we have a pull down resistor so it's it's always at zero unless there truly is a pulse or a shift in the relay without this you can have a floating signal and get bad counts all right got all the wires coming from the sensors and I'm coming down and this is my little test bed for now this will go into an enclosure that I don't have just yet uh basically we're gonna test all the sensors out we got power supply here giving it power this is to simulate the solar panel so this is a pretty much real world test of what would be out there eventually the enclosure is going to get mounted onto the tripod frame here uh quickly go through the centers we got a wind direction sensor this sensor communicates through a modbus protocol to a Serial signal rxtx and that's how we read the data uh we got the rain fall sensor this sensor communicates with just a digital input and it comes through on this guy and it is going to an interrupt pin on the Arduino Nano from these cables here coming from the Stevenson screen um they come in split off you got a couple digital signals I squared T signals uh Power ground and then one of them is actually a complete spare for more sensors if we ever want to add more sensors in the future uh One Direction it just communicates over a analog voltage signal got the antenna look at the sensors in the enclosure we have two power supplies here this is gonna bump it down to 12 volts four over 12 volt signals this guy is going to bump it to um 5 volts for all the five volt logic sensors um we have an SD card on board and then the NRF 24l Wireless Communicator that's all the sensors on board in the enclosure to wrap up the weather station part we're going to finish wiring all of the wires that come into the main panel next thing you're going to see me do is Mount the solar panels to the tripod the solar panel is mounted to 3D printed brackets that zip tie onto the legs in the end I had to Pivot away from the solar panels do on this first revision due to such high current that the device pulls I'm not putting the device to sleep or have really any power saving stuff on board because I wanted live data so it has to be on all the time passed in that data future revisions down the road I do have plans for there being a power saving mode and maybe from the GUI you can turn on high power or power saving mode the way I got around not having to use the solar panels was I took a laptop charger cut it up up and basically I ran an extension cord out there so it's a tethered weather station so I have 120 volts running out that jumps into a laptop charger which outputs 19 volts which then our 12 volt regulator regulates it to 12 volts and five to receive the data we 3D printed a receiver box that was printed in two halves then glued together and then we sand and painted it it holds two I squared C LED screens it has the antenna to receive the data it also has a real time clock module and it has a temperature and humidity sensor to measure the indoor temperature I thought it would be neat to compare the indoor versus outdoor temperatures the way the receiver works is it can detect if the serial port is open and sending data and so when that's the case we'll just cut the screens off and just let all the data be on the GUI but this this works independently of the GUI so you don't need to have the serial Cable in it will receive all of the data and display it on its own LCD screens the way I'm attaching screws to the receiver module is with these heat set inserts basically what you do is you take a soldering iron with a special tip you can even use a typical soldering iron tip and the Heat of the soldering arm will heat up the brass Heat insert and it'll set it into the 3D printed part to install the weather station I used a screw in ground anchor once that was screwed in I checked it with a plumb bob to make sure that I was pulling directly above and wasn't pulling at any weird angle after that I used a cam locking Carabiner attached to the center column with 550 paracord wrapped up and locked into place and of course with anything you install in your backyard you have to let your dog come over and check it out and make sure it's acceptable to stay in the backyard and it does appear that he likes it I really like the way this GUI came out and probably my favorite part is the center which is the wind speed and wind direction I really like how smooth and live that day is in the top left hand corner that's our all of our outside sensors the top right is all of our inside sensors and then on the bottom right is the rainfall and lightning strike counters you'll notice on some of the graphs it doesn't really make sense and that's because in some of these videos it was under construction at that time the way that works is the bar graph shows you your current rainfall and also your previous seven days you also have a monthly counter and a yearly counter on there and then moving over to the left hand side those are going to be buttons the high power and low power or the buttons I was talking about earlier this also has the ability to pull up the Wendy website and view their radar this GUI it's kind of hard to show how it was built and that be entertaining but it was built in the processing IDE it's mainly built in JavaScript and HTML well that wraps up the weather station video some of the long-term goals with this project is to either store a bunch of data and learn how to implement machine learning to create my own forecast or we could donate it to a school and let students learn about the technology and how to read sensors or just use it for all the upcoming projects that a weather station would be handy on if you enjoyed this video please be sure to like And subscribe that really helps me out [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: NateMakes

Views: 14,189

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Id: pQkzYkxxyOU

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2023