21 replies to this topic

[Scott Green]

I've been working on a standalone NetDuino+ solution that utilizes the following hardware.... Wind Speed / Wind Direction / Rain Fall - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8942 Barometric Pressure - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9694 OneWire temp sensor - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/245 Light Meter - Jameco part Serial LCD - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9068 Door Switches - Jameco part Humidity - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9569 I originaly built this so that I could check wind speed, and direction for flying RC Airplanes, but now I've decided to add some other things like monitoring Door Openings on my workshop, a WebServer so you can see instant weather stats and trends, etc. Is anyone remotely interested in this? If so, I'll start posting build log notes, pictures and code. I'm using a lot of stuff that others on the forums have contributed. Post a reply to this thread if you are interested in progress / code. Scott...

[Chris Walker]

Hi Scott, With a hurricane heading this way and humidity and wind kicking into high gear, I for one find your project fascinating Weater stations are one of those things that many technical people appreciate--and which seem within the real of DIY--but that most people wouldn't approach. If you blogged the project and showed folks how to do it, I bet that quite a few would build their own (or at minimum, pick up tips from your experience). Thank you for sharing this with the community, Chris

[Nevyn]

Is anyone remotely interested in this? If so, I'll start posting build log notes, pictures and code. I'm using a lot of stuff that others on the forums have contributed.

Scott,

I'd be interested in some of the components here. I was looking at some of these items as part of a greenhouse monitoring and control system.

Regards,
Mark

[Maurice Spronkers]

Hi Scott, I'am interested in a blog and source code. I bought recently a weather station witch came with the sparkfun Wind Speed / Wind Direction / Rain Fall meter. I was wondering if I could connect it to a netduino. Main question is is the netduino fast enough to read the windspeed. Thanks for the datasheet. Maurice Spronkers

[segu]

Hi Scott

Is anyone remotely interested in this? If so, I'll start posting build log notes, pictures and code...

I am for sure much, much more than remotely interested

Post a reply to this thread if you are interested in progress / code.
Scott...

Posting a reply and a big thanks for sharing knowledge

Hector

[sleepless]

Hello Scott, Your information would be highly appreciated! I just ordered my netduino plus and was aiming for building a weatherstation. It would be nice to see the progress you have done so far! Regards, B.

[JonnyBoats]

I too find this sort of project fascinating. Thanks in advance for whatever details you choose to share with us.

[Scott Green]

Wow, ok... Here are a few pictures of the build... Scott...

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•  IMG_01541.JPG   1.09MB   395 downloads
•  IMG_01551.JPG   1.39MB   274 downloads

[ajcg1973]

Wow, ok... Here are a few pictures of the build...

Scott...

Hi Scott,

Where did you get the board mount wire holders (what I assume to be the function of the green and orange wire blocks in the last picture)? I have been looking for something that will hold some wires that are moved often a bit tighter than just plugging them into the breadboard directly.

[Scott Green]

Hi Scott,

Where did you get the board mount wire holders (what I assume to be the function of the green and orange wire blocks in the last picture)? I have been looking for something that will hold some wires that are moved often a bit tighter than just plugging them into the breadboard directly.

Bought them from Sparkfun. http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10655 They also have screw terminals, but these work pretty good...

Scott...

[Scott Green]

Making decent progress on the WeatherStation. Originally I was wanting to do all of the code on the Netduino, but got to the point where I was running out of memory. So, now I use the netduino to gather the sensor data and push it via a socket connection to a socket server app running on another PC. This push happens once per second. The server creates an XML file that contains one minute averages for all of the sensor data. I can pull this XML file into excel to see trends for all of the data points. I am logging: Wind Speed, Wind Direction, Rainfall, Inside Temp, Outside Temp, Barometric Pressure, Humidity and Light Level. Should be enough to do some cool weather monitoring. Running into a problem on the Netduino side. After about 6-7 hours of monitoring sensors, the netduino locks up and quits sending data to the server. It locks up to the point that its not accepting any interrupts anymore as well. I know this because I have an LED that fires every 1/2 revolution of the windspeed sensor, and it quits blinking. Not sure what is going on at this point, but I have narrowed it down to the point that I am reading from one of my onewire devices. Scott...

[Stavros Tekes]

I guess you should add some outputs to see at which point it gets stuck. Maybe the memory consumption gets bigger as time passes by and the netduino crashes... I think it is a good practice to have a thread "observing" the running processes or the system health so it can for example try to reconnect if the socket connection gets dropped for some reason or kill other threads the seem unresponsive and start them over. Very interested on your project, as we are also trying to gather data from external devices (serial port and analogue ports). Good luck with it, and keep up posted

[Scott Green]

Well found the source of the problem... I had 2 of them... 1) I added a small web server to display instant stats of all things weather with the project. If you bang it really hard it crashes. Just like a web site DOS attack. I had port 80 open to the internet and someone was pinging me. Closed the port in the router, and fixed the lockup. 2) After I fixed #1 it was still sending updates to the socket server, but it was not sampling new data anymore. I was stumped, then remembered that the push to the socket server wakes up on a timer thread every 1 second to send the data. Put it into debug mode overnight. The main thread died with a "Divide by Zero" error, and the timer thread was just humming along every second. The divide by zero was cause I rolled over an Int16 to -1, added 1 and did an average calculation. Resulted in zero, and that was the problem. Now the weather station is pumping data without lockups to the socket server. Over the weekend, I'm hoping to get some progress made making a circuit board for the outside parts (Humidity, Light, Temp and Barometric Pressure). The quest continues... Scott...

[Scott Green]

More progress... Created a circuit board for the Light Sensor, Humidity, Temp and Barometric pressure... Attached pictures. Video of Circuit Board being created by CNC machine Bummer, cant upload any pictures cause they are 2mb, and apparently we have a 5mb global limit to uploads... Scott...

[Scott Green]

Got the PCB finished. I put it on the end of a 20 foot cat 5 cable and am having some problems. The board interfaces with the netduino on I2C and 1 Wire. I2C seems pretty stable, but the 1 wire device (Quad A/D) is causing problems. The netduino will only intermittantly recognize anything on the 1wire bus with the board plugged in (Another local 1 wire device is on the breadboard that is not recognized when the board is plugged in). Sometime it works after complete power cycle, but it gets random junk back. I'll figure it out, but expected it to work cause I have other 1 wire devices that are on the end of 50' cables using Parasite power with no prob (hooked to PC). Scott...

[fosshooter]

I've been working on a standalone NetDuino+ solution that utilizes the following hardware....

Wind Speed / Wind Direction / Rain Fall - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8942
Barometric Pressure - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9694
OneWire temp sensor - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/245
Light Meter - Jameco part
Serial LCD - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9068
Door Switches - Jameco part
Humidity - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9569

I originaly built this so that I could check wind speed, and direction for flying RC Airplanes, but now I've decided to add some other things like monitoring Door Openings on my workshop, a WebServer so you can see instant weather stats and trends, etc.

Is anyone remotely interested in this? If so, I'll start posting build log notes, pictures and code. I'm using a lot of stuff that others on the forums have contributed.

Post a reply to this thread if you are interested in progress / code.

Scott...

Environment Parameters monitoring was my college prj using 8051 microcontroller.. will try that now with netduino !!!

[scanman]

Scott, how is your project going ? I am interested in it. How did those weather sensors work out are they robust or bust?

[Scott Green]

Scanman, Super sorry about the reply delay. I totally missed your question. The weather station is pretty much done from a hardware perspective. I've attached 2 pictures, 1 of the disassembled final product, and one of the assembled weather monitor. What you are seeing is the monitoring hardware / home station. This consists of a circuit board that acts like a shield on the netduino. External to this box are an internal temp probe, an external box (outside) with Humidity, temp, Barometric pressure, and light level. There is also a weather station connection that provides wind speed, wind direction and rainfall. This monitor broadcasts packets to a dedicated windows server that tracks all of the weather statistics and provides a web based interface to the weather station. On the box is an LCD, LED and a Momentary switch. The LED blinks once for every revolution of wind, so I can visually see the wind speed from across the room. We routinely get 75mph winds where I live. The momentary pushbutton cycles through various LCD screens that give me instant access to all of the immediate weather stats. This was certainly a fun project. Probably pretty aggressive to take on as the 1st project with the netduino, but I had a great time doing it. Figured out how to create circuit boards on my CNC router which is a huge win for me! This will open up a whole new world of projects in the future. The DS1820 temp probes work well. I have no complaints about them at this point. You have to do some calibration between them, cause you will find that each one has slightly different temp readings, plus you have to make sure that you compensate for bad CRC values, and some bogus temp readings that you get from time to time. All in all, they are pretty easy to use with the 4.1.1 Alpha firmware. The one device that I am not happy with is the humidity sensor (Sparkfun). I've not found a super accurate way to read these things. The calculation requires a Zero humidity voltage reference value, and the only way you can get that is if you order it with the chip specific data sheet, and sparkfun does not supply that. Also, I get bogus reading from it all of the time. I think I can improve the logic to isolate the bogus readings, by ignoring huge second over second swings, but havent found a way to fix the reference problem. I'll keep hacking. Scott...

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[aero]

Great stuff! I also want to build a weather station with the weather sensors from Sparkfun, but i would like it to send sensor data over a GSM/GPRS network. I intent to use the Cellular Shield with SM5100B and feed the data to a web page. I hope i work this out. Your project seems to have a lot of this solved.

[seuabb]

Replay, tks for your share!