Student Project Report: Wireless Weather Station (SEE712) - April 2019

This project report details the development of a wireless, low-cost portable weather station using an Arduino board. The project focuses on monitoring key weather parameters including wind speed, temperature, and rainfall. The system architecture incorporates various sensors: a mechanical servo gauge for wind speed, a temperature and humidity sensor, and a rain sensor. The report includes an abstract, introduction outlining the significance of weather monitoring and the limitations of existing systems, and a detailed description of the proposed weather station's components and functionalities. The report also features a flowchart illustrating the program's logic, a progress update, and a conclusion summarizing the project's achievements. Relevant references are included for further study.

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PROJECT REPORT
WIRELESS WEATHER STATION
<STUDENT NAME>
<STUDENT ID>
APRIL 5, 2019

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1. ABSTRACT
Weather monitoring and forecasting has become a crucial part of our daily life routine
as it has a lot of applications. The manual work of measuring the weather is tedious and requires
more maintenance and skilled workers. Moreover, there are more chances of errors in manual
recording of weather data. To overcome this issue, a wireless low-cost portable weather station
is proposed in this project. Arduino board is used as a main component to monitor the wind
speed, temperature, and rain. Wind speed is measured using the mechanical servo gauge,
temperature and humidity sensor is used to measure the temperature and rain and snow sensor
is used to measure the raindrops.

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Contents
1. ABSTRACT............................................................................................................. 1
2. INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................... 3
3.1. Arduino ............................................................................................................ 5
3.2. Wind speed ....................................................................................................... 5
3.3. Temperature ...................................................................................................... 5
3.4. Rain .................................................................................................................. 6
3.5. FLOWCHART OF THE PROGRAM ............................................................... 6
4. PROGRESS TO DATE ............................................................................................ 7
Table 4.1 List of the received components .................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
5. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 8
6. REFERENCE ........................................................................................................... 8

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List of Figures
Figure 1: Architecture of Weather Station ................................................. 5
Figure 2:Flow Chart of the program .......................................................... 6
Figure 3: Received Components ................................................................ 7
List of Tables
Table 1:List of the received components…………………………………6

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2. INTRODUCTION
The weather station is a device which collects the features from the environment by
using different sensors. Weather sensors such as a thermometer to measure temperature, a
barometer to measure pressure from the atmosphere, hygrometer measures relative humidity,
an anemometer measures the wind speed, a wind vane determines which direction the wind is
blowing and a rain gauge measures rainfall.
Nowadays, private weather monitoring station is used in places like airports, agriculture
agencies, and harbour to accumulate the data. These data are utilized for their own purpose and
occasionally it is shared between third parties. The weather station used in the institution is a
high cost due to the use of the hardware and software components. In addition to that, these
stations are not customizable, and the data produced is stored locally in the station. Low-cost
stations can be used in the companies and home to monitor the weather. The generated data can
be stored or shared online. The stored data can be used to study the climatic changes and its
standard of a region.
(Devaraju et al., 2015) proposed weather station with features like Modbus
communication protocol, which provides communication to the base station over both wired
and wireless. At the base station, the received data is uploaded to an online server to give access
the weather measurements worldwide.
(Abdul-Niby et al., 2017) proposed weather station consisting of indoor and outdoor.
The outdoor unit measures the humidity, temperature, wind speed, pressure, and rain. The
indoor unit displays the outdoor unit reading along with the temperature and humidity of the
room, on an LCD. This weather information can be monitored through iOS and Android
application.

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3. PROPOSED WEATHER STATION:
The purpose of the project is to monitor the Temperature, Wind speed, and Rain.
Components of the weather station are Arduino, servo gauge, temperature sensor, rain sensor,
LED barograph and buzzer. A CPU fan is used as a wind source. The number of rotations from
the fan is used as an input to Arduino board. Mechanical gauge displays the value. Temperature
and humidity sensor is used to observe the atmospheric temperature and LED barograph
displays the output value. Snow rain sensor is used, when the raindrops fall on the input sensor
the active buzzer at the output is activated.
Figure 1: Architecture of Weather Station
3.1. Arduino
Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on hardware and software. In this
project, Arduino Atmega 2560 is used. It has an 8-bit microcontroller with 54 digital input and
output pin, 16 MHz crystal oscillator, 16 analog input and 256 KB of flash memory. The input
devices are connected to the board. Arduino programming is used to calculate the input value
and send a command to the output device. The output device displays the value.
3.2. Wind speed
A CPU fan with 3 pins is used. Hall Effect in the fan is used to measure the rotation of
the blade. The blade rotates according to the wind speed in the atmosphere. The rotations
obtained from the specific duration of the time is used to calculate the speed of the wind. The
more wind gives more rotations, the low wind gives fewer rotations. Based on the rotation the
mechanical gauge displays the wind speed.
3.3. Temperature
Digital temperature sensor measure temperature with a surface mounted NTC, Negative
Temperature Coefficient, a temperature sensor (thermistor) built into the unit. The resistance of

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the thermistor changes according to the external temperature. Based on the resistance value the
LED barograph can be used to display the value of the temperature.
3.4. Rain
The rain sensor is used to detect the drops of water, in which the nickel is coated in form
of lines. It works on the principle of resistance. When there is no drop of rain the resistance is
high. When there is a drop of rain the resistance reduces since the water is a good conductor of
electricity, the water connects the nickel lines, so the resistance gets reduced.
3.5. FLOWCHART OF THE PROGRAM
Figure 2:Flow Chart of the program
Input taken by
sensor from
LED, Gauge,
Buzzer
external
environment
Wait for 2 Seconds
Analog value
applied into
Arduino board
Digitalised output
is displayed using

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4. PROGRESS TO DATE
Figure 3: Received Components
Table 1: List of the received components
S.NO COMPONENT NAME
1 ARDUINO ATMEGA 2560
2 3 WIRE CPU FAN
3 MECHANICAL GAUGE
4 LED BAROGRAPH
5 RAIN SENSOR
6 ACTIVE BUZZER

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5. CONCLUSION
This project proposes low-cost portable weather station. Arduino board is used to
communicate between the input sensors and output display unit. The temperature, wind speed,
and rain are measured by using a temperature sensor, mechanical gauge, and raindrop sensor.
6. REFERENCES
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] Devaraju, J., Suhas, K., Mohana, H. and Patil, V. (2015). Wireless Portable Microcontroller
based Weather Monitoring Station. Measurement, 76, pp.189200.