Automatic Weather Station

This project proposes an automatic, wireless and portable solution for weather monitoring and forecasting. It uses Arduino based micro-controller boards and IoT sensors to measure temperature, rainfall, and wind speed. The system aims to reduce manual maintenance and increase efficiency in weather monitoring.

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Project Report
Whether Station
<Student name>
4-9-2019

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1. ABSTRACT
Due to immense number of applications of the weather prediction and monitoring, it is important to develop
an automatic system for completing this task. Doing this job manually makes it more tedious and increases
the chances and risk factors of getting errors in the final results. Also, manual maintenance requires a lot of
trained human power which further increases the cost of the system. Thus, in this project, an automatic,
wireless and portable solution to the problem of whether monitoring and forecasting is proposed. The main
components used include Arduino based micro-controller boards, and various IoT based sensors for
monitoring the temperature, amount of rainfall and the speed of the wind. To measure the wind speed, a
mechanical servo gauge is used and temperature and rainfall is measured using a temperature and humidity
sensor,.

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Table of Contents
1. ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... 1
2. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 3
3. Related literature ................................................................................................................................. 3
4. PROPOSED WEATHER STATION: .................................................................................................. 3
4.1. Arduino ........................................................................................................................................ 4
4.2. Wind speed .................................................................................................................................. 4
4.3. Temperature ................................................................................................................................. 4
4.4. Rain ............................................................................................................................................. 4
4.5. FLOWCHART OF THE PROGRAM ........................................................................................... 5
4. PROGRESS TO DATE ....................................................................................................................... 5
5. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 6
6. REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................... 6

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2. INTRODUCTION
The latest technology termed as Internet of Things enables us to develop a weather station which is capable
of collecting the features from the environment by using different sensors. The devices like thermometer,
barometer, hygrometer, anemometer, etc. are already in use for measuring different parameters of the
climate change. The temperature is measured using a thermometer, a barometer to measure pressure from
the atmosphere, relative humidity is measured by a hygrometer, and the wind speed is generally measured
using the anemometer. The direction of the wind is determined using a wind vane.
Presently, many places like agricultural units, industries, airports, harbours, etc. use private weather
monitoring stations to collect the climate data. These data sets are consumed for their own purpose and
uses. It can also be shared among other stakeholders as a medium to earn more revenue. These stations
costs very high to the institutions due to their manufacturing components. Moreover, these stations are not
flexible, and the data generated is stored locally in the stations.
Hence to overcome the problem of cost and to increase more flexibility, this project aims to develop a
automatic whether station which can be used by various companies and institutions to monitor the weather.
The received data can be easily stored or shared online. The stored data can be used to study the climatic
changes and its standard of a region. It will reduce the man power and error risks in the system. It will also
be helpful in saving a lot of time.
3. Related literature
(Devaraju et al., 2015) proposed a weather station with features like possible real time wired and wireless
communication to the base station by using Modbus communication protocol. An online server is used at
the base station to store and analyse the received data.
(Abdul-Niby et al., 2017) recommended a weather station model consisting of phases including indoor and
outdoor mechanisms. The measurements like humidity, temperature, wind speed, pressure, and rain are
measured using the outdoor unit. The readings of the outdoor units are displayed by the indoor unit on the
LCD display. Both iOS and Android applications support the monitoring of the information of the weather
collected.
4. PROPOSED WEATHER STATION:
The proposed idea of the weather station is used to measure the Temperature, Wind speed, and Rain.
Components used to develop the project include Arduino, servo gauge, temperature sensor, rain sensor,
LED barograph and a buzzer.
For the wind source, A CPU fan is used. The input to the Arduino boards is given in the terms of number
of rotations of the fan. The value is displayed using a mechanical gauge. The atmospheric temperature is
measured using the DTH Temperature and humidity sensor. LED barograph displays the output value. The
rainfall is analysed using a snow rain sensor.

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Figure 1: Architecture of Weather Station
4.1. Arduino
Arduino is a hardware board incorporated with an Integrated Development Environment. It is an open-
source electronics platform for electronics and embedded projects. In the proposed project, the
microcontroller used is Arduino Atmega 2560.
Specifications of this boards include:
It is a 8-bit microcontroller with overall 54 digital input and output pins. It contains a 16 MHz crystal
oscillator, 16 pins for analog input and 256 KB of flash memory. The input devices are directly connected
to the micro-controller. Arduino programming based on C language is used to analyse the input value and
give a command to the output devices. The output devices are used to display the values like a LCD Screen.
4.2. Wind speed
Three pins are used to measure the CPU fan. The rotation of the blade is measured by the concept of Hall
Effect in the fan. The rotation of the blade depends on the speed of the wind. The rotations recognized in a
specific unit of time are used in calculating the speed of the wind. The number of rotations is directly
proportional to the number of speed of the wind. Based on the number of rotations recorded, the wind speed
is displayed by the mechanical gauge.
4.3. Temperature
Digital temperature sensor DTH measures the atmospheric temperature. A thermistor and a temperature
Coefficient is built into the unit. The external temperature is responsible for changing the resistance of the
thermistor. The value of the temperature is displayed by the LED Barograph on the basis of the value of
the resistance.
4.4. Rain
The drops of water are sensed by using a rain sensor. The rain sensor includes a nickel, coated in form of
several lines. The working principle is the principle of resistance. The resistance is high when there is no
drop of rain and it is low when water encounters the sensor as it is a good electricity conductor.

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4.5. FLOWCHART OF THE PROGRAM
4. PROGRESS TO DATE
Figure 3: Received Components
Input taken by the sensors from the external
enviornment
The analog values are fed to the Arduino board
Delay time for calculations and analysis
Displays the output values

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Table 1: List of the received components
S.NO COMPONENTS USED
1 ARDUINO ATMEGA 2560
2 3 WIRE CPU FAN
3 MECHANICAL GAUGE
4 LED BAROGRAPH
5 RAIN SENSOR
6 ACTIVE BUZZER
5. CONCLUSION
A low-cost, more efficient and a portable weather station is proposed in this project. Arduino
microcontroller board is used for the communication between the sensors and output units. A temperature
sensor, a mechanical gauge, and a raindrop sensor are used to measure the parameters of the climate like
temperature, wind speed and the amount of rainfall.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Abdul-Niby, M., Farhat, M., Abdullah, M. and Nazzal, A. (2017). A Low-Cost Automated
Weather Station for Real Time Local Measurements. Engineering, Technology and Applied Science
Research, 7(3), pp. 1615-1618.
[2] Brito, R. C., Favarim, F., Calin, G. and Todt, E. (2017). Development of a low cost weather
station using free hardware and software. Latin American Robotics Symposium (LARS) and 2017
Brazilian Symposium on Robotics (SBR), pp.1-6.
[3] Devaraju, J., Suhas, K., Mohana, H. and Patil, V. (2015). Wireless Portable Microcontroller
based Weather Monitoring Station. Measurement, 76, pp.189200.