DIY Solar Powered Weather Station

hello everyone this is robert and this is my outdoor kind of weather station thing that i'm using for wind speed data for my indoor wind chimes i have a video down below if you want to know more about that project but i wanted to do a little bit more in depth on this thing because i think this aspect of it can be used for a lot of different applications like powering outdoor solar lights you could use it for outdoor cameras things like that it's kind of a nice little simple package for doing stuff like that in addition to wind speed sensors so be sure to check out the chapter listing for this video so you can skip around and find the chapters that are important to you but let's get started talking about this outdoor wind speed solar powered thing so what exactly is this thing and why should you care well i can mostly answer the first part of that second part that's all on you this is a way for me to get wind speed data from my yard into my house so that it can power my um indoor wind chimes and like i said you can check the link down below for more information on that project because it might seem kind of weird so we basically have this weather station we have a solar panel and then we have all the guts inside this box now why did i go this route well the thing about wind speed is that i really want it very localized i could have used something like weather underground i could use some online service but that's not really going to be what the weather is right in my yard that's going to be you know some other weather station somewhere else so second question why didn't i just buy a simple weather station off of amazon or something like that there's a lot of kind of iot weather stations out there well that's a good question but i wanted a really good reliability and i'm not saying that those things aren't reliable but maybe i don't want to rely on my wi-fi being up maybe i don't even want to rely on power being available because let's say during a big windstorm and maybe that's when i want the thing to work and we do have a fair amount of power outages here so i wanted something that was very self-contained very reliable and kind of acts on its own you know this thing is a closed source it's its own thing the other problem with some of those weather stations that you see on you know amazon and elsewhere is they're kind of proprietary they just have an outdoor thing and then they have the indoor thing and you can't really easily hack into that and get the actual wind speed out of it so that is why i came up with this and i've talked about this a little bit in my other video but that needed it to be self-contained so it has a solar power to charge the battery inside of here and then its own weather station so this thing that you're seeing is everything that is needed to send the information inside so let's um do a little bit of a look inside and i'll go over the solar panel and the charger setup because i think that is really useful for a lot of people because you don't have to hook this up to a weather station you could use this for cameras or a little outdoor fountain landscape lighting all sorts of things like that so let's take a look inside this box so let's talk about the actual charging setup and the power supply in this so in here we have a massive 12 volt sealed lead acid battery i got this size mostly because it fit inside this enclosure nicely and i wanted this to go multiple multiple days without having to charge this is way way overkill but at the same time i could expand this system to have additional outputs to support some cameras things like that where i'm going to be placing this in the yard it kind of looks out into open space and there's some prairie dogs and actually some coyotes and stuff so i maybe want to point a camera there and this would be able to support that as well so here's the system we've got this nice little weather sealed enclosure and i have links to all this stuff below of course that's how you keep the lights on all right so i've got this um yeah relatively decent little enclosure we've got a sealed lead acid battery this is a little 3d printed sled that it sits on and then we have the solar panel this is a 10 watt solar panel this is also weather sealed as well and then we have a charger up here so the way this works is the solar panel goes in right here and it goes directly into the input on the charger and then the charger goes into the battery and then there's an output you actually have a 5 volt usb output i don't know if you can see that there you go a little 5 volt usb and then you also have a 12 volt output on this that goes directly into this barrel jack that plugs into the arduino in the middle so that's kind of um all there is to it these little charge controllers have gotten really inexpensive and they're really commonly available on you know amazon ebay wherever and i think this was only like 30 bucks something like that and you can set it to different battery types they're really nice solar stuff has gotten a lot better so for a power system like this all you need is a solar panel running into a charge controller running into a battery and then you're all set so let's talk a little bit about the electronics we've got a spark phone red redboard which is basically just a clone knockoff of a arduino uno and then on top of that we have the sparkfun weather shield i went this route because well i know this product quite well from working at sparkfun and it plugs directly into the weather station which is off camera right now and all of the code is pretty much done for me so this was really really really simple to do and then you can see over here i've got one of these nrf24l01 transceivers i have a separate video about that and then that sends all the wireless data out so this is a nice really self-contained very simple system so last thing i want to talk about are cable glands people don't always end up using these and they're really helpful you can get these in a large assortment but they're really useful for making these water-tight connectors you know something like that they're double ended and they have a little sleeve on the inside now what happens when you have something strange like this to where the sleeve is round and this obviously isn't a round cable well you can 3d print out of tpu your own little sleeve and that's exactly what i have right here you can see that i just kind of modeled the cable and then made a little coupler spacer thing out of tpu and i just kind of made slits in the sides where i could slide in the cable that goes in there and then when i clamp this down it squishes that tpu and makes a nice tight connection between there so cable glands are fantastic i have an assortment of them somewhere you can get these a nice little assortment on amazon and they come in handy for projects like this all the time so yeah that's about all there is to it i didn't really go into any details on this weather station because it's really just a spark fun product that you can buy and there's a whole tutorial on how you connect it in with the weather shield i'll link to that down below but it's pretty simple you basically just plug this in and then load the library and you're instantly reading the stuff from here so nice and simple uh so yeah that's all i got for this video check out all the links down below for all of this lovely stuff and i'll see you again next video thanks for watching

Channel: Robert Cowan

Views: 8,606

Keywords: diy weather station, solar weather station, arduino weather station, sparkfun weather shield

Id: 4NVc05_MB9Q

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 11 2022