DIY Smart Home Weather Station - Wind, Rain, Temperature, Pressure, Humidity, Light

I set up a DIY weather station in my garden that's connected to home assistant and logs everything from wind speed and direction to rainfall and temperature why you might ask well partly because I'm a nerd who loves data collection and partly because I kind of want a vertical wind turbine but I want to see if it's actually worth installing it in my garden before I drop a hefty chunk of change on what so here's how you can do this too although if I'm being perfectly transparent I can't actually recommend the kit that I'm using and you'll see why well this is the kit that I bought it's from The Good Ship pepperoni and it's their Enviro weather kit now to be clear you can just buy the weather station sensors yourself the the wind speed and direction and the rain level sensors along with their mounting arms and a pole all for around the same price as most Standalone weather stations that don't connect to anything they just give you a little Wireless display of course Those sensors won't actually do anything on their own you'll have to hook something up to them I would guess any sp32 running ESP home would be the easiest but that's up to you naturally if you'd rather not build a data capture device yourself their Enviro weatherboard seems like the perfect fit not only does it let you use all three of those sensors but it comes with a BME 280 pressure temperature and humidity sensor and an LTR 559 light sensor too that is all connected to the world via a backpacked Raspberry Pi Pico W and it's powered by a little dual AAA battery holder now pimarroni claims that with the right settings this can get six months of battery life with two double a batteries so that should be pretty healthy now since this is also somewhat a review of this kit itself let me explain a little bit how all of this stuff actually works first off on the hardware side it looks like the wind speed sensor is basically just a rotary encoder or a switch which effectively sends a pulse after it completes one rotation if you know the size of the cups and how many pulses you get in a second well you can work out how fast the cups are moving and therefore work out how fast the wind speed is the wind direction version or the wind direction sensor I think is pretty similar but with a number more positions I think 16 in total that it can report the rain sensor is actually pretty clever it's basically a seesaw mechanism where at least according to their open source firmware it takes 0.2794 millimeters of rain to get the sea salt tip from one side to the other it then counts how many ticks it sees over a given time period and then can add that up to give you the total amount of rainfall to set up the kids you'll obviously want to mount the hardware sensors to their mounts and then the whole thing to something outside as securely as you can the rj11 cable from the wind speed sensor actually plugs into the wind direction sensors pass-through ports and then both the rj11 cables from the direction sensor and the rain sensors will then need to plug into the board now the full kit does include an enclosure for the pie Peak or the Enviro board and the battery pack although they say you will need to drill a hole in the bottom of it to be able to fit the cables in plugging in the battery pack to the board along with the rain and wind sensor cables and then switch the battery back on you'll be greeted with a rapidly blinking white LED or activity leders of warning LED that is your signal to fire up your phone and connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot that it's created to provision it the setup menu looks great if kinda buggy and basically asks you to give it a name connect a Wi-Fi network and then tell it where you want to send its data to you can have it store the data locally and you come and manually retrieve the readings or you can have it post the data to a websocket to an influx database mqtt or Adafruit IO I'm already using mqtt for my solar charge controller bridge and it's generally the best way to send data to home assistant so that's what I'm using here one of the most important settings for battery life is how often it takes readings and how often it publishes those results to your chosen output method the default settings are new readings every 15 minutes and upload them after five readings are taken now they actually recommend every 10 readings so I'm not sure why 5 is the default but still basically this kind of queuing results helps save the battery life as connecting to the network is a fairly power hungry task so doing so one you know one burst every two and a half hours every 15 minutes and 10 readings makes sense unfortunately on the firmware version that ships with these boards that feature seems to be broken at least for mqtt it only ever transmit the most recent result despite taking two and a half hours between those Transmissions what's even more frustrating although this isn't permaroni's faults is that home assistant seems to use the time of arrival to know when new data is from rather than say a timestamp built into the message of results that means that even if the feature did work all of those 10 results would show up as one time stock because they're all received at the same time rather than backfill that data making the data kind of functionally useless now the former can be fixed by updating the firmware and technically the latter can be fixed by just uploading one result at a time but that degrades the battery life considerably you will want to get comfortable upgrading the firmer on these boards though as the alpha tag that they list it's very much accurate this is painfully buggy and the documentation is both dense and sparse I'm someone who is clearly very comfortable with tech programming microcontrollers and electronics I designed and hand manufactured the open source response time tool so I currently have some idea of what I'm doing when it comes to hobbyist electronics like these still I don't have any experience with the rp2040 chip that the Enviro board is based on and that meant that I had no idea how to backup my config.pi filer check the logs.txt as their documentation recommends plugging the board into your PC in its standard device mode much like any microcontroller only shows up as a serial Port not a USB device and a file system I followed their instructions for upgrading the firmware which is to hold the boot select button that's on the Pico down while you press the reset ports and then the board will show up as a removable USB stick except no file system shows up only a space to drop the dot uf2 firmware file it took a lot of forum posts and YouTube video watching to find out that I needed a third-party tool called Sony and then to click this definitely not a button at the bottom right of the screen to select the Pico's com port and then it finally showed up although make sure that it's not in the bootloader mode when you try and connect I.E it's not connected as a USB stick put it in the normal mode by pressing the boot select button and reset again but the thing is none of that was included in their documentation so anyone who isn't already proficient with the rp2040 and developing for it would have no idea where to even begin something else that isn't supported is home assistant at least natively using mqtt home assistant needs the device to basically register itself with the mqtt broker in home assistant that is normally the mosquito addon that lets home assistant know to create entities and listen out for new updates from the board these Enviro boards don't support that it's something I think I know how to do and actually as of actually filming this I think I've already implemented it so keep an eye out for a pull request there but until I or someone else does add that in it's not supported you'll need to edit your configuration.yamo file using the file editor add-on to add each of the values that it reports as its own entity I'll leave a link in the description to my post on pimarroni's GitHub repo which contains all of the code you'll need to set up at least the weatherboard in home assistant now remember how I said that this was a buggy mess well yeah after realizing the home assistant wouldn't accept multi-packet bursts properly I set it to take a new reading every 30 minutes and upload after every reading that is five times faster than the recommended settings but I mean I can deal with it burning through batteries once a month or so especially if I've used some rechargeables sadly after just 12 hours of somewhat useless readings because it's every 30 minutes the data just stopped no new packets were being sent which is just wonderful I brought it inside worked out how to connect to it found that it was storing all of the data still but the logs just showed that it flat out stopped that's when I upgraded the firmware set it back up again and then stuck it back out of sight I woke up the next day to find out that it was dead like no new data at all again wonderful turns out that the batteries were dead yeah two whole days of battery life is what I got out of that it was right around that time that uh well I gave up and hardwired it I already have a solar battery Bank in the shed I have a waterproof enclosure that's providing power to my frankly terrible rowing machine and the wind station is literally strapped to the frame for my solar panels so I just ran a 5 meter USB cable and set the board to pump out new results every five minutes and there's been so much more useful the wind is often somewhat inconsistent so before I was basically getting a lot of flat lines at zero meters per second but now I'm seeing much more of the Peaks and troughs it's much more granular and I have no problems with it needing new batteries beautiful to be clear it still crashed a few times although I did barge some hacks and the firmware which seems to make it reliable but uh well who knows at this point so it should be pretty clear why I can't recommend this kit right now I think in a few months when some of the bugs have been worked out I can see this being a great choice for the data curious but still having the data on how windy it is out there is going to be very useful for me assessing whether a wind turbine is a worthwhile investment for me and of course that will be a at least one if not multiple videos on the channel so do make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that I will leave a link to both pironi's GitHub and the full kit in the description if you're interested none of those are affiliate links by the way and yeah that's kind of it if you have any questions if you have any suggestions if you have any thoughts in general feel free to leave those in the comments down below if you want any more information like I said leave that in the comments check out the GitHub page and Hope hopefully I will have an update for the the board to support home assistant fingers crossed I'm going to be testing that later so we'll see how it goes but yeah if you want to support me and my idfc then you can check out the YouTube you know join button become a member become a patreon pick up ahead of your T-shirt like this one or a load of other affiliate links that don't cost you anything to use but do help me out when you use them and they're Linked In the description there's also plenty of other videos on the end cards including the rest of the smart home series with more regular smart home stuff and also the solar series if you want to check that one out too otherwise thanks for watching hope you enjoyed it we'll see on the next video

Channel: TechteamGB

Views: 31,661

Keywords: techteamgb, Tech teamGB, GB, tech, Tech team GB, weather station, home weather station, wireless weather station, weather station review, weather station with rain gauge, sainlogic weather station review, smart home, rain sensor, home assistant, home automation, diy weather station, weather station installation, weather station setup, home weather station uk, home weather station installation, pimoroni, enviro, enviro weather, pimoroni enviro

Id: snCp0TqrER4

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023