Developing a Home Weather Station for Realtime Weather Prediction

Instructions In the final project, you have the opportunity to develop the project you proposed in module 6. Your project must contribute and bring value to a business or individual(s).

What to Submit? For the final project, you will submit the following: Word or PDF document containing the details of the project with images. Include the steps you took and the images must be screenshots of your project. Do not copy and paste instructions and images from another source.

Use your own instructions and images of the steps you did! A video (between 5 and no more than 10 minutes) showing your project in action. Include in your video the steps you took while building the project (from beginning to end). Post the video on YouTube and if you prefer, make it unlisted (viewable with a link only). Then share the link in the assignment submission. You can also use KalturaLinks to an external site. available for you here in our course to record your screen and upload it to the assignment.

The objective of the project is to create a home Weather station that has the ability to collect the local weather data while making use of different sensors and predict the weather in realtime. 

Weather change is a dynamic phenomenon and there are various factors that contribute to the changing atmospheric state. The prediction and forecasting of this changing weather is quite hard to predict. Additionally, Modern day technology provides tools for the same but are expensive.

The goal of this project is to provide a solution to the existing problem of weather prediction, by designing a weather station that has the ability to predict weather in real time using local data and at the same time is affordable which serves the cost and is a quality solution to the problem.

Technical Requirements:

• The Oracle Raspberry Pi Weather Station Software (to be cloned from Github repository)
• The BME280 Python LIbrary
• The MariaDB database server software

Design Aspects:

The design aspects of the weather station considers various factors affecting weather to be considered which includes temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall. BME280 sensor can help measure temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure, using the sensor in python script we can get the readings for these. Anemometer can help measure the wind speed, it can be used as a button connected to Raspberry Pi which measures how fast the anemometer spins, producing signals that calculate the wind speed. Wind vane has resistors, by connecting it to Raspberry Pi, we can measure the resistance as analogue signals, to detect the wind direction the analogue signals are converted to digital using analogue-to-digital converter. Rain gauge can be used to measure the precipitation in mm in height collected on 1 m.sq. during a particular time. The complete design can be enclosed in a weatherproof box providing a house to all the equipment and the environmental sensors and then, can be installed outside to work efficiently and collect the weather data. In addition to this, to deal with the data collection and analysis, database configuration is required to store the weather data and wireless connectivity is required to view and analyse data. 

The hardware materials required for making a reliable weather station includes:

• Temperature, Pressure and Humidity Sensor such as BME280
• Digital thermal probe such as DS18B20 with 1m lead
• Resistors - 4.7 K Ohm (Two in quantity)
• Raspberry PI with wireless connectivity or WiFi dongle, breadboard and jumper wires
• Rain gauge, wind vane and anemometer, weatherproof enclosures
• 5 mm pitch PCB mounted screw terminal blocks
• RJ11 breakout boards (Two in quantity)
• MCP3008 Integrated circuit analogue-to-digital convertor

The project requires the gathering of all required materials for setting up a weather station, the assembly of components with Raspberry Pi will take some time and a python script is required to check its working. So, to complete this project, I think a minimum of 4 weeks are required.