On personal and professional weather stations

Hope you sell a million of them!
Happy Thanksgiving Anthony and mods

Good prices (did they fall off Sanat’s sligh?) but too much of a UHI at my place for sensible results.
Even the nearby agricultural research station’s data show an increase in average minimum temperatures as a “step change” of 0.7⁰C after the waste water treatment (and groundwater injection) plant next to it was expanded. Big impact in a dry climate.

Hope your bussiness goes well Anthony despite all your work for this blog, you deserve it!
Meanwhile we follow the weather at home (and the automation inside home: temperature, lights on/of, blinds closed or not, sunscreen position, watering the tomatoes in the greenhouse…) thanks to an Oregon Scientific WMR100 station and a small computer…
The weather station is not that accurate, but good enough to see that it is cold at home and raining as usual, while we baked in the sun somewhere on the West Coast of Australia (last year) or another nice place while travelling…

Farmers may be a market, large farms need multiples due variation of wind and temperature with elevation (valleys and ridges).
One farm in the Peace River area of NE BC and into AB set up their own in order to determine whether or not rainfall and temperature values from the nearest normal reporting station (a city like Dawson Creek) correlated to their farm. IIRC one of those two parameters did, the other did not.
Another market is schools, some have them for science teaching (and econ-nut activities).
Another is muncipalites of varying geography, Langford BC has a few stations to measure rainfall so they can jump on high rates that might overflow drainage systems.

Anthony, I live near Fairbanks Alaska and have a Vantage Pro 2 with the standard radiation shield. Is there any way you could update / upgrade it to display and record temperatures lower than -39 degrees F?
REPLY: No, I’m sorry there isn’t – Anthony

Do you ship down under. You know the 54ish state before Julia divorced Barack, or was it the other way round.

I know this post will somehow hack into Anthony’s business… However, as much as I dream of having my own fancy weather station, I cannot afford it.
But I can afford this:
An Arduino (Arduino means “Strong Friend” in Italian) microcontroller interfaced to the web (ethernet shield), or a Raspberry Pi, or a Beagle Bone or a pcDuinoV2 MiniPC with Arduino headers Linux Android and simple sensors can yield amazing results. Use a high precision I2C bus precision sensor. The Arduino comes with tons of examples. Each of these microcontrollers can be bought for 15 to 60$ (bought from the western world suppliers or from Hong Kong (HobbyKing, genuine boards from Italy). The sensor probably costs five to twenty bucks.
Note: I am not commercially affiliated in any way with HobbyKing. It simply is the most affordable source of hardware.
Power supply: PRODUCT ID: 381000102 price: $3.78 USD
Arduino LM2577 DC-DC Adjustable Step-up Power Converter Module
Input voltage :3-34V Output voltage: cont. adjustable (4-35V) Output Current: 2.5A (MAX)
Real time clock: PRODUCT ID: 381000099 price: $6.47 USD
DS1307 RTC Clock Module I2C bus output
There is also a more accurate Real Time Clock , same price range, that is using the ICSP bus (also easy to program on the Arduino)
Barometric sensor: BMP085 Breakout I2C bus interface Price: $9.87 USD prod. ID 381000109
Or item # 074000073, even cheaper, same chip, comes with cables !
measuring range: 300 to 1100 hPa with an absolute accuracy of down to 0.03 hPa.
(yeah, that’s 0.023 mm of mercury, or 0.306mm of water column ! ! ! )
voltage supply: 1.8 and 3.6VDC.
Digital Temperature Sensor Module DS18B20 V2.0
calibrated digital temperature readings directly and precisely without complicated calculation in code from -55°C to +125°C (-67°F to +257°F) with ± 0.5°C accuracy from -10°C to +85°C.
[Note by me: this thingie has an analog output… you have to make sure your Arduino A/D converter is accurate too…]
Arduinos easily interface with the popular and reliable XBee transmitters (with up to several km of range). All the libraries are written to facilitate their interfacing on Arduinos microcontrollers.
There is a wide gamut of sensors available. GPS sensors, distance sensors (ultrasonic, infrared), pressure, acceleration, angle, etc. Very cheap.
The revolutionary fully integrated automatic pilot (diydrones.com) (GPS, 6 axis accelerometer/gyro, 3 axis magnetometer, precision altimeter, programable for fully autonomous flight, retailing at around $110USD ) is running on an Arduino 2560 (about 19 bucks at HobbyKing).
As for Arduinos themselves, just google for them, or go to Arduino.cc (creative commons top level domain name). It is an open platform, copylefted microcontroller based on the Atmel ATMega 328 or 2560 chips. All schematic are copylefted, you can start manufacturing your own and sell if it you want. There are all flavors of Arduinos variants, some with ethernet built in, some with other functions built-in (data loggers, etc). The physical layout of Arduinos is such that you can stack functionality modules (called “shields) atop the controller: sensors, LCD displays, wifi, transmitters/receivers, motor controllers, sensors, SD cards, and you name it! The microcontroller is pre-loaded with software that makes its programming easy in a C-like syntax that does not require the arcane C function definition and set-up. It has several analog (10 bits) inputs, a dozen digital I/O, programmable as regular TTL outputs, or as Pulse Width Modulation pseudo-analog output. It has timer interrupts, and pin interrupts. Various flavors of Arduino have more or less of these capabilities.
You can get a very respectable board for about $9.95 USD (Arduino Nano).
Everything is programmable directly from your USB computer port, and the software to program it is simple (kids use it aplenty).
There is an event-driven graphical programming environment that is coming out soon (mid-december) called ArduBlock. The released version is very sketchy, but some beta releases are interesting (must ask and dig for it quite a lot to find them though).
For excellent tutorials, search for Jeremy Blum Arduino on Youtube. Again, I am not affiliated in any way with him. He’s a kid just out of engineering school, and did a mighty job at creating these easy tutorials.
My guess, you can build a decent weather station for approx 50$, with some careful casing work and OCD calibration of your sensors… Oh, they also have relative humidity sensors.
HobbyKing’s inventory fluctuates, is always changing.
You can use the interrupt input to measure the toggling bucket from the rain sensor.
You can use an analog input to measure the voltage from a small DC motor to measure wind speed.
You can possibly use a laser diode and a photo transistor and an analog input to measure haze in the air.
You can use differential optical sensors to measure sunlight.
You can use color sensors to possibly measure blue sky.
It’s never easy, but it’s feasible.
And you can pump all of your data on the net, the software probably already exists, at least base modules that comply to some established standards.
All of that is done by “makers”, people who build for the passion of building.
Cheers!
JFA in Montreal

I think my place would be a perfect spot for one. I can place it 100 feet from buildings or asphalt, on grass. Sadly, I can’t afford such a luxury these days.

Thanks for the sale Anthony. I’ve been wanting to buy a wireless Vantage Pro 2 for awhile now and your great prices put me over the edge. Thanks to my wife too for allowing me to buy my own Christmas present.

Thanks Bob Jakicic for the info. I hadn’t checked all the specs of the available stuff. There is so much break-out boards that pop in and out of the market, I can’t follow it all.
For accurate measures, I wouldn’t trust those semiconductor thingies out of the box. I’d prefer an RTD. I don’t know what the Vantage system use. I know that that there is a RTD break-out board, complete with 24 (?) bit A/D converter I think. It sells for (from the top of my head) in the 17$ range, but then, the RTD itself is expensive (I dunno if it can accomodate copper RTD). But again, the Arduino, and any break-out boards would require a lot of elbow grease, as any A/D conversion accuracy within the full range of temperature can be put in doubt. Maybe a less precise sensor is required to add temperature compensation of the conversion circuit. Maybe not, but I would not assume right out of the box that things would work, and careful calibration would be in order, both of the sensor and of the circuitry. It is not a trivial thing. If your time is cheap, Arduino is the way to go. If your time is expensive, the already tested Vantage is the way to go, if the data is to have any value. My 2¢.
But it’s a fun project.