WFS – Weather Forecast System

Several years ago i tried to find a wind and weather station to suit my needs. The ones i found that did exactly what i wanted did not log and the ones that did log data where fare to advanced. I also had one special need, the station needed to move every weekend. As it was intended to monitor the winds on a stage construction. So i figured i make my own station, how hard can it be, right?

Now several years later i accept the fact that these things take time. Specially if it is your first time writing that particular coding language. i have learned a lot and is grateful for the challenges i have gotten to solve.

The project is still in prototype, and there are stuff that would like to improve and fix.

Future improvements

  • Container for the PSU, display and all electronics. I would like a made up one and not a general box that is modified to fit the system.
  • Better weather forecast.
  • Better graphs and user options on the graphs.
  • second screen to only see historical data.
  • Less memory usage over time.
  • probably more…

Electronics

I have used kiCAD for drawing schematics. There are three PCB inside the container. One power distro, one anemometer step down , and a sensor board.

Parts

The part lists is quite simple, and i used the following parts:

  • Raspberry PI 3 B+
  • Bosch BME680
  • NEO-6M
  • A suitable power supply, i use a Meanwell RD-35. A dual supply with 5V and 12V with 32W capacity.
  • A anemometer with pulse signal.

The container i just used a box that suited my needs for the prototype and plan to design a box and 3D print it myself or via a supplier.

Code

All code is written in python. For the most i used this project to learn python. I was very new to python when i started, and the first prototypes used Arduino only. At one point i used one RaspberryPi and two Arduinos.

All code is found here: https://github.com/fesanb/wfs

The only part of the whole project that is not python is a bash script that is used to install the whole system to a Linux device.

References

https://www.python.org/

https://www.raspberrypi.org/

https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/