I Upgraded My 3D Printed IoT Weather Station Using Your Suggestions

in today's video we're going to be making some upgrades from our previously built weather station which was suggested by you guys in the comments together these upgrades have substantially improved the accuracy reliability and battery life of the weather station i've also included a link to the public thingspeak channel in the video description so you can have a look at the most recently recorded data to start off i'm going to be replacing the dht11 temperature and humidity sensor with a bme280 sensor this sensor measures temperature humidity and pressure with much better accuracy and is faster too this also means that i can remove the separate pressure sensor from my original build and i'll leave the light sensor at the top in place the next change that was suggested was made by quite a few people and this was to replace the reed switch on the anemometer or wind speed sensor with the hall effect sensor i haven't used one of these before and there are quite a few different options available so the one i chose was an allegro a3213 this sensor is polarity independent and has a latch digital output so it's quite a good fit as a replacement for a read i'm also going to be replacing the original 18650 cell with a higher capacity 3000 milliamp hour lithium polymer cell this cell will give it around 30 to 50 percent more energy storage so it'll be able to run longer between charges and also has built-in overcharge and over discharge protection let's start by replacing the sensors i'm going to be installing the bme 280 module with the sensor facing towards the stand this shields it from any direct sunlight that manages to get into the housing and also gives it a bit more protection for moisture the sensors still space slightly away from the stand so there aren't any pockets of air trapped around it replacing the reed switch with the hall effect sensor is a bit more involved as i have to first remove the reed switch which i molded in place with resin i also didn't want to have to print a whole new housing just for the new sensor after a couple of failed attempts to remove it a drill eventually worked to crack the switch and i could then pull out all of the pieces i also cracked the top of the housing but fortunately resin prints repair quite well with more resin so that will be an easy fix i added some wiring to the sensor before installing it in the housing so that i can again pour some resin around it to hold it in place and seal off the top of the sensor housing i shouldn't need to do anything with the magnets in the anemometer if they worked with the reed switch then they should easily work with the hall effect sensor as well now that that's all done we can make up a new wiring harness to connect the sensors to the fire beetle board this is where i made some changes to the wiring rather than having the sensor stay on all the time a suggestion was made to turn the sensors on and off using the eye opens as they don't draw much current so i've got the bme280 sensor connected to one digital pin and the light and hall effect sensor connected to another this means that i can now turn the sensors on and off only when measurements are taken so this should further extend the battery life while we're on the topic of turning sensors on and off i also made some changes to the code the first and probably most significant is a lookup table for the wind speed ian had a number of ideas to improve this in the code pointing out that the relationship between wind speed and the rotation time is not always linear he also included a formula to use as a starting point i use this along with some measured data to eventually calibrate the sensor and it now uses this table to find the actual wind speed next i made the changes to the digital pins to turn them on and off as they needed rather than staying on all the term i also reduced the on cycle time to about 8 seconds as this is all that's needed by the wind sensor lastly i move the wifi connection right to the end of the cycle so that the connection isn't active for the full cycle time i also added a timeout to the wi-fi connection attempt routine in my previous code the board would stay on and keep attempting to connect to the wi-fi network even if it was temporarily unavailable or there was an error this eventually dramatically reduced the battery life and resulted in the station dying in a day or two if this occurred it'll now try for 10 seconds and if there's no connection available then it just goes to sleep anyway let's test the power consumption on the weather station now that we've made some hardware and some software changes which should have helped to make it more efficient so the fire beetle board now uses a little over 100 milliamps when starting up it settles at around 45 to 50 milliamps when taking readings which is for most of the on time and it now goes down to just 0.01 milliamps or 11 microamps during sleep which is a pretty substantial improvement over the last version this one's using almost 100 times less power during sleep mode than previously so if we calculate the expected battery life using a 10 minute cycle time with 10 seconds of on time in each cycle and an average current draw of 60 milliamps with the new battery we should get just under 3 000 hours or 124 days of runtime so that's four months of a single charge which is also a great improvement i fold in the void around the hall effect sensor and repaired the crack with some uv resin i then let it cure in the sun for a few hours so we can now put it all back together i 3d printed a bracket to mount the weather station onto a 25 millimeter pole which is easier to mount onto a railing or fence post now i know that improving the battery life means it'll hardly ever need to be charged but to make it a truly plug-in and forget where the station i wanted to add a solar panel so the battery is always kept charged i'm going to use this 5 volt panel which i have from a previous project it claims to be a 1 amp panel but that seems a bit optimistic for its size in any case it's way over what we need to replace the 25 or so milliamp hours used each day i'm going to use a df robot solar power management board to control the charging this board basically takes the power from the solar panel and charges the battery it also provides a regulated power supply to the fire beetle board i've made a 3d printed bracket and housing to hold the panel in the solar power management board then these will be installed on the same pole underneath the weather station [Music] [Music] so that's it for my modifications it has been running for about three weeks since i upgraded it and you can go to my thinkspeak channel linked in the video description if you'd like to have a look at the data being collected since the power consumption has gone down quite substantially i've been thinking about trying to power it using some sort of super capacitor arrangement rather than a battery let me know if you've done this or if you've got any suggestions for it in the comments section [Music] thanks for watching please remember to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe for more tech and electronics projects tutorials and reviews you

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 18,383

Keywords: Arduino, ESP32, Firebeetle, DF Robot, Solar Power, Weather Station, Reed Switch, Hall Effect, Anemometer, Temperature, Humidity, Pressure, Light, BME280, DHT11, Solar Power Management, Solar Powered, Lithium Polymer, Battery Powered, WiFi, Thingspeak, IoT

Id: xVK4bF5U2Xk

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021