The weather-station comes with a base station, a rain sensor, wind speed and direction sensor, an external humidity and temperature sensor and a small solar panel to supply addional power to the devices, make the battery life longer.
You can also use the data to upload it to your own website, and display the data there, this would look something like this:
The above pages can be customized if you wish. The wview interface software uploads the data through an FTP link and updates the necessary files every 5 minutes.
Since this weather-station is usually located somewhere in your living room, entrance, etc. a small computer connected with USB is desired to be attached to it, perhaps as small as possible to stay hidden from the eyes of the visitors. Last year I found a small Zotac computer which was about a 10 inch square and can be wall mounted. I installed Ubuntu server on this last year and I was quite happy with it till I saw there are better, smaller and much cheaper options on the market these days.
Some people used the Raspberry PI for this and that works perfectly well, however the recent advances of the single board computers introduced several new variants some even with dual core Cortex processors. Some examples are: Marsboard, Cubieboard A10, Cubieboard A20, Cubietruck.
So why these and why not the Raspberry PI? Well, first these are much faster, second these have a lot more NAND memory, so one can run a full version of linux (Ubuntu) server with additional capabilities. The Cubieboards have 2Gb, 4Gb and even 9Gb NAND flash memory which makes them perfect for this job. With 2 USB ports, possibilities to add a SATA HDD (even SSD) this little beast can become quite a server for your weather-station.
I purchased mime from http://store.r0ck.me/, but the shipping and responses from them were very slow, order from here only if you do not want it right away. On the other side I ordered some cubietruck boards from here: https://www.miniand.com/ and surprisingly this site was very fast in processing and shipping as well.
The home page where you can find a whole bunch of information about these boards is: http://cubieboard.org/ with a comprehensive repository of images and a so-so active forum which eventually helped me to finalize this project.
The cubieboard A20 used in this project looks like this:
- a case for your cubieboard A20 which will allow a cleaner installation - no circuit board will be visible
Since this weather-station is usually located somewhere in your living room, entrance, etc. a small computer connected with USB is desired to be attached to it, perhaps as small as possible to stay hidden from the eyes of the visitors. Last year I found a small Zotac computer which was about a 10 inch square and can be wall mounted. I installed Ubuntu server on this last year and I was quite happy with it till I saw there are better, smaller and much cheaper options on the market these days.
Some people used the Raspberry PI for this and that works perfectly well, however the recent advances of the single board computers introduced several new variants some even with dual core Cortex processors. Some examples are: Marsboard, Cubieboard A10, Cubieboard A20, Cubietruck.
So why these and why not the Raspberry PI? Well, first these are much faster, second these have a lot more NAND memory, so one can run a full version of linux (Ubuntu) server with additional capabilities. The Cubieboards have 2Gb, 4Gb and even 9Gb NAND flash memory which makes them perfect for this job. With 2 USB ports, possibilities to add a SATA HDD (even SSD) this little beast can become quite a server for your weather-station.
I purchased mime from http://store.r0ck.me/, but the shipping and responses from them were very slow, order from here only if you do not want it right away. On the other side I ordered some cubietruck boards from here: https://www.miniand.com/ and surprisingly this site was very fast in processing and shipping as well.
The home page where you can find a whole bunch of information about these boards is: http://cubieboard.org/ with a comprehensive repository of images and a so-so active forum which eventually helped me to finalize this project.
The cubieboard A20 used in this project looks like this:
The board has 4Gb of NAND Flash, plenty to run a full linux server on it. The Dual core A20 processor is very fast, with the Ubuntu server is installed on it will boot in less that 8-10 seconds.
There are 3 more things you should purchase with your cubieboard A20:
- a USB wireless plug (around 8-9 dollars, well worth the price)
- a 2A power supply which has enough juice to power the board from a 110V outlet
Once you received all these you are ready to start the work and build your own weather-station.
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