Overview
I've always wanted to build a weather station. I have an interest in weather science but, for me a weather station is all of the stuff I like about electronics - real world use of remote sensing that can be used for practical stuff. From home automation to gardening to knowing what's in the air, local weather and environmental sensing can be used to make subtle cumulative changes that add up to better health and lower bills.
Goals
The basic goals of this project are to build a set of instruments that record to a central database the following environmental conditions:
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Barometric Pressure
- Heat Index (calculated)
- Wind Chill (calculated)
- Wind Speed / Direction
- Rainfall (inches)
- Rainfall (Is it raining)
- Rainfall (Intensity - light, moderate, heavy)
- Lightning (counts per minute)
- LUX
Equally important but secondary in order is a station that measures air quality. Since air quality is somewhat subjective for my use case, I will focus on this group after the initial station has matured and is stable.
This data should be stored in a local database for analysis and consumption by other devices / applicaitons.
Applicable uses include
- HVAC control and scheduling
- Control of attic/crawl space dampers / fans for optimal venting
- HVAC indoor / outdoor air mixing control
- Irrigation control and scheduling
- Warning of open windows and doors at the start of a storm
- Early notification of approaching storm front
- Statistical analysis of correlation between local outdoor climate and home energy consumption
- Statistical analysis of changes to stucture / behavior and correlation to home energy consumption
- Automatic shutdown of sensitive electrical systems on approach of advancing electrical storms
Timeline
Currently, I do not have a fixed deadline for this project group. I have already made some progress which I will detail in future posts.