The Greatest of Ease
Build a low-powered wireless system for your outdoor weather station using inexpensive hardware.
Sending your data through the air
At SwitchDoc Labs, we like weather stuff and are always building more weather stations and adding new sensors; I have written about these in several articles [1]-[3]. This time, I decided I didn't want to run wires from the wind sensors on the weather station into the lab. It was a pain because of the way the building is constructed. What to do? Build a wireless system, christened WXLink, to send the data, make it solar powered, and give it a pretty good range through walls. My goal was to consume an average of less than 5mA.
Although I'm using this setup to transmit weather information, you can use it to send any data wirelessly. I'm running at 9600bps, but you can get more range with slower bit rates or bump up the speed to send data faster.
The first prototype of the wireless system I built was a proof of concept using Arduino Unos, Grove shields, and the Grove Serial Pro transmitter. The current for that system ran way over 100mA (about 0.5W) and would have required a big solar panel. With clever software (putting the computer to sleep between readings and turning off the transmitter module), I got the average current down to about 50mA. This prototype worked functionally, but still used too much power. One point became clear: I had way more computer and speed than I needed using an Arduino Uno, so I moved on to prototype 2 (Figure 1).
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