Dear friends welcome to another video! In this video we are going to build a WiFi
enabled weather station project! We are going to use the new, impressive ESP32
chip for the first time along with a Nextion display. Let’s get started! Hello, guys, I am Nick and welcome to educ8s.tv
a channel that is all about DIY electronics projects. In this channel, I share everything about
the projects I build to help you develop similar projects or inspire you to start making things
because it is easy, fun and creative. Subscribe to the channel now if you do not
want to miss any future video. In this video, we are going to make this. It is yet another weather station project
I know, but this time we use the new ESP32 chip! We also use the new BME280 sensor which measures
the temperature, the humidity, and the barometric pressure. When we power up the project, it connects
to the WiFi network, and it is going to retrieve the weather forecast for my location from
the openweathermap website. Then it will display the forecast on this
3.2” Nextion Touch Display along with the readings from the sensor! The readings are updated every two seconds
and the weather forecast every hour! As you can see, in this project we use the
latest technologies available to a maker today! If you are a DIY veteran, you can build this
project in five minutes. If you are a beginner, you have to watch a
couple of videos before attempting this project. You can watch those videos by clicking on
the cards that will appear during the video. Let’s start! In order to build this project we need the
following parts: • An ESP32 board
• A BME280 I2C sensor • A 3.2” Nextion display
• Some wires The cost of the project is around 30$. You can find links to the all the parts I
use in the description of the video below. Instead of the ESP32, we could use the cheaper
ESP8266 chip, but I decided to use the ESP32 to gain some experience with it and see what
works and what not. This is the first project I ever build with
the new ESP32 chip. If you are not familiar with it, the ESP32
chip is the successor of the popular ESP8266 chip we have used many times in the past. The ESP32 is a beast! It offers two 32 processing cores which operate
at 160MHz, a massive amount of memory, WiFi, Bluetooth and many other features with a cost
of around 7$! Amazing stuff! Please watch the detailed review I have prepared
about the chip by clicking on the card here. It will help understand why this chip will
change the way we make things forever! Also, this is the first project I build with
a Nextion touch display. The Nextion displays are new kind of displays. They have their own ARM processor at the back
which is responsible for driving the display and creating the graphical user interface. So, we can use them with any microcontroller
and achieve spectacular results. I have prepared a detailed review of this
Nextion display which explains in depth how they work, how to use them and their drawbacks. You can watch it by clicking on this card. The connection of the parts is straightforward
as you can see from this schematic diagram. You can find a link to the schematic diagram
in the description of the video below. Since the BME280 sensor uses the I2C interface,
we only need to connect two wires to communicate with ESP32. I have attached the sensor to Pins 26 and
27. In theory, every digital pin of the ESP32
board can be used with I2C peripherals. In practice though, I found out that some
pins did not work because they are reserved for other uses. Pins 26 and 27 function great! To send data to the display, we only need
to connect one wire to the TX0 pin of the ESP32. I had to bend the pin like this to connect
the female wire of the display since the ESP32 board is too big for this breadboard. After connecting the parts, we have to load
the code to the ESP32, and we have to load the GUI to the Nextion display. If you have trouble uploading the program
to the ESP32 board, hold down the BOOT button after pressing the upload button on the Arduino
IDE. To load the GUI to the Nextion display, copy
the WeatherStation.tft file I am going to share with you to an empty SD card. Put the SD card into the SD card slot at the
back of the display. Then power up the display, and the GUI will
be loaded. Then remove the SD card and connect the power
again. After successfully loading the code the project
will connect to the WiFi network, it will get the weather forecast from the openweathermap.org
website, and it will display the readings from the sensor. Let’s now see the software side of the project. To parse the weather data, we need the excellent
Arduino JSON library. We also need a library for the sensor. You can find links to all the libraries in
the description of the video below. Let’s see the code now. At first, we have to set the SSID and the
password of our WiFi network. Next, we have to enter the free APIKEY from
operweathermap.org website. To create your own API key, you have to sign
up on the website. Getting current weather data and forecast
is free, but the website offers more options if you are willing to pay some money. Next, we have to find the id of our location. Find your location and copy the ID which can
be found in the URL of your location. Then enter your city’s id in the CityID
variable. Also, enter the altitude of your town in this
variable. This value is needed for accurate barometric
pressure readings from the sensor. Now we are ready to move on. At first, we initialize the sensor, and we
connect to the WiFi Network. Then we request weather data from the server. We get a reply with the weather data in JSON
format. Before sending the data to the JSON library,
I manually delete some characters that were causing me problems. Then the JSON library takes over, and we can
easily save the data that we need in variables. After we have kept the data in variables,
all we have to do, is to display them on the screen and wait an hour before requesting
new data from the server. The only information I present is the weather
forecast, but you can display more information if you wish. It all here saved in variables. Then we read the temperature, the humidity
and the barometric pressure from the sensor and we send the data to the Nextion display. To update the display, we simply send some
commands to the serial port. If you get this compilation error while compiling,
you have to add this -fno-threadsafe-statics at the platform.txt file which is located
here: … Press save, and then the project will compile fine. The software for the ESP32 is not mature,
yet so some things do not work at once yet. The Nextion GUI consists of a background,
some textboxes and a picture that changes depending on the weather forecast. Please watch Nextion display tutorial for
more information. You can quickly design your own GUI if you
wish and display more things on it. As always you can find the code of the project
in a link in the description of the video. As you can see, an experienced maker today
can build exciting projects in just a few hours with a few lines of code and only three
parts! A project like this would have been impossible
to make even two years ago! Of course, this is just the beginning of the
project. I would like to add many features to it, like
graphs, touch functionality that is now missing, maybe a bigger display and of course a beautiful
looking 3D printed enclosure. I will also design a better looking GUI and
icons. I have some very fresh ideas to implement! I would love to hear your opinion about today’s
project. What kind of features do you want me to add
to the project? Do you like how it looks? How do you want to see it evolve? Please post your ideas in the comments section
below; I love reading your thoughts! If this is your first time here, I would love
to have you subscribed. In this channel, I post videos about DIY projects
twice a month. I love making things, and I believe that anyone
can make things, anyone can become a maker. That’s why I created this channel, to share
my knowledge with the community and learn from the community. I hope you will join us. I will see you in the next video! [ Translating these subtitles?Add your name here! ]
