Solar Power, Weather and the Raspberry Pi
SwitchDoc Labs is in the process of building a Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Weather
Station. The design will be released as a SwitchDoc Appnote, an Instructable and a series of posts on SwitchDoc.com. We are right in the middle of putting the physical parts into a weather proof box.
Parts List
- WeatherRack Weather Sensors
- BUD NEMA Box from Amazon.com
- VoltaicSystems Solar Panel(s) – jury is still out regarding 1 or 2 panels
- Raspberry Pi A+
- Raspberry Pi Compatible WiFi USB Dongle
- SunAirPlus Solar Power Controller
- USB Control (SwitchDoc Labs – starts shipping April 6)
- SwitchDoc Labs Dual WatchDog Timer
- WeatherPiArduino Weather Board
- Embedded Adventures I2C Lightning Detector MOD-1016 board
- DS3231 RTC With EEPROM
- AM2315 Outdoor Temperature and Humidity Sensor
- BMP180 Barometer and Temperature Sensor
- Adafruit HTU21D-F Temperature/Humidity breakout board
- Adafruit 32KB FRAM I2C breakout board
- Adafruit ADS1015 4 Channel A/D I2C board
- Adafruit PKCELL Lithium Ion Battery Pack – 3.7V 6600mAh
- Waterproof 8 Pin Plug from Amazon.com
- Dual Row 4 Position Covered Screw Terminal Block Strip from Amazon.com
- RasPiConnect Control Panel
Block Diagram
Below is the current block diagram for the Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Weather Station system.
Software
We will be releasing the entire base software package in April 2015. If you are rolling your own, the base drivers have been released.
SwitchDoc Labs has now released the first version of the Arduino C++ Class software for the WeatherPiArduino board. You can find it here on the switchdoclabs github. The Raspberry Pi Pure Python Software is here.
This board will interface with both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino.
We are using RasPiConnect for our control panel. Want to build a control panel for the WeatherStation? Look at this post and the picture below:
