Weather center

imagesimple little breadboard project combining a bunch of sensors with a raspberry pi and graphing the results.

smallGraph

 

IMAG0771_1
8 analog to digital inputs via 2 12c connections.

The the sensors pictured are the bmp085 barometric pressure sensor and the HIH-6130 humidity sensor, both from sparkfun. Ive since figured out the dark art of surface mounted soldering and ordered a bunch of break out boards for all the standard sizes from adafruit. so hopefully buying cheap components on a red break out board for a lot of money is a thing of the past.

The raspberry pi is hosting the graph (dygraph js library) on its own web server.

A simple python script runs once every 5 minutes and poles the sensors over the GPIO pins,  the two sensors are communicate via i2c, so its simple, but i have several gas sensors and a particle counter that return analog data (which the raspberry pi doesnt natively support)  i ive started preparing an i2c analog to digital converter for them.

 

 

Work remaining:

  • i need to handle the job as a linux cron job rather than python schedule (to make it less prone to failure)
  • i need a good way to manage the gas the gas sensors, as they require little elements to be heated and will eat a moderate amount of power.
  • solar power would be great, but this will require me learning the magic behind muli cell lithium charging and ruthless power management.
  • depending on how cumbersome the csv log file becomes, i may need to roll it over to a database.

 

 

Leave a Reply