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YAWS - (Yet Another Weather Station)

Arduino Based Weather Receiver

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The project centers on receiving weather data from Oregon Scientific 433Mhz sensors and storing data in a MySQL database. A large LCD Display provides colorful graphics for the user to view. Update - Ditching the wireless due to reliability issues.

There are many home-brewed and even semi-production worthy weather station widgets out there that will intercept 433Mhz and 915Mhz weather sensor data. What I started out to do was use Oregon Scientific equipment on 433Mhz. After having this run for a couple of months I experienced enough disruptions to make me rethink the strategy. In general the way these work is each sensor, indoor and outdoor temperature, rain and wind barf out a data stream at some predefined interval. Since each sensor is independent the information arrives at the receiver in a fairly random manner. You can also never be guaranteed a complete 'set' of data before one of the sensors barfs out another stream. I ran into this rather often when the indoor sensor would log pretty regularly while the outdoor sensors would be much more sporadic. In the database there are 10X more rows for indoor data than outdoor data. Not knowing exactly how the sensors are programmed it's difficult to set expectations on how often they should report. The rain gauge for example, only reports once every few minutes unless it's raining which makes sense. However, I've also noticed signal degradation during rainy weather.

There seem to be many things capable of interfering with 433MHz transmissions. When I had the original equipment setup there were many times the console would not receive wind or rain data from sensors that were less than 25' away. (Before you ask, no I don't live near power lines, sunspots, nuclear reactors or the guy experimenting with EMP's in his garage).

Ok, enough griping, let's focus on the cool display. This is a 5.1" TFT display from www.buydisplay.com which has an integrated RA8875 controller and some other bells and whistles if desired. It comes with all interfaces, parallel, SPI and I2C which are selected by changing solder-blob jumpers and moving a few SMT resistors. Or, you just order it with the interface you want. Be WARNED, there is no I2C library available. At least I couldn't find one. I'm using the 4-wire SPI interface. To be fair you can also get this display and a separate controller from Adafruit.

There are a couple of good libraries for the RA8875 and even one for the buydisplay board on GitHub.

  • Disappointing To Say The Least....

    Jeff Thomas01/31/2015 at 21:32 0 comments

    The display looks nice but there seems to be a memory leak in my code somewhere. The system runs for about 18 hours then freezes and needs a reset. I've backed way up and have the system running without the display and without the Stackarray.h module. So far it's been running for weeks without a problem.

    More later...

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Adam Fabio wrote 05/29/2015 at 04:00 point

Hey Jeff! You've got a great display here! If you share your source code (on github or a similar repo) we might be able to help you find that pesky bug. 

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