metachronistic

The Arduino weather station is coming along. Today I integrated a barometric pressure sensor and a calibrated light sensor into the hardware and software. The pressure sensor is a SPC1000-D01, which is sensitive to pressure changes as small as the difference within a 9 cm column of air. It can be used in several different configurations depending on how often you want to get a reading, and how much precision it reports. At the best frequency and precision, the sensor was drawing enough current that I was having trouble adding other sensors to the Arduino, so I’m running it in it’s lowest power configuration (where the chip is in a low power standby mode until you ask it for a reading). The light sensor is a TSL230R, which is also very accurate. It has three different sensitivity levels that can be changed at any time, which means that when the light intensity gets too high or low, the Arduino changes the sensitivity of the sensor to keep the results within range. The only down side to these chips are they require a lot of digital pins (four for the pressure sensor, five for the light sensor).

Here’s a circuit diagram of the current setup. If you click the image, you can view a PDF version. There’s also an Arduino xcircuit diagram. This is the first circuit I’ve ever tried to draw, so it probably isn’t as well laid-out at it should be.

The code is also available. It’s not pretty, but it works. If you do download it, the code include a simple analog light sensor (light0), which isn’t shown on the wiring diagram. I was using it before I got the new sensor set up, and haven’t removed it from the hardware yet.

My Arduino-based weather station has improved in the last week to the point where it’s delivering useful data. I’ve got five DS18B20 temperature sensors hooked up and reporting their temperatures to my Goldstream Creek Weather Pages. In the image on the top of the post, the Arduino is on the left, the indoor sensors are in the middle, and the outdoor cluster of temperature sensors is on the right (under a yogurt container). At the moment, I’m just averaging the data from the two sensors that are inside and the three outside, but eventually I’d like to place each sensor in a different location. I’m not sure where the outdoor sensors will go, but one of the indoor sensors will move up to the second floor of the house. Twisted-pair telephone cables carry the data and power to the sensor clusters.

I’ve also connected a cheap photoresistor to the sensor cluster in the house. I’m converting the resistance it reports to a value from 0 (dark) to 100 (light). It’s in a place that rarely gets direct sunlight, so the values should give some idea of when the sun is up, and whether it’s sunny or cloudy. I have a more sophisticated light sensor (TSL203R) and a barometric pressure sensor (SCP1000), but haven’t tried them yet. I’ve run out of breadboards, and now that my Arduino is actively delivering data, I’m a bit less inclined to experiment.

I think it’ll be interesting to compare the outdoor temperatures from behind the house with the temperature coming from the Rainwise weather station atop the dog yard gate. Also, there ought to be an obvious relationship between outdoor temperature, light, and indoor temperature, since it seems like the house heats up much more quickly when the sun is beating on the south facing side. If I was really ambitious, the windows and window-shades could be connected to the system: it’d open the windows when it detected cooler temperatures outside than inside, and close the shades in whichever window is getting direct sunlight.

Once the design and software has stabilized, I’ll be sure to post the schematics and code.