Tag Archives: mini weather station


Arduino Mini weather station

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Matej Blagšič posted instructions for building a Bluetooth-enabled Arduino-based mini weather station that can measure ambient temperature, pressure and humidity.

Arduino mini weather station

Arduino mini weather station

The main question is why did I/we choose the Seeeduino V4. If we were going for a cheap Chinese alternative, we could have gone with Funduinos or anything like that, as the Seeeduino is only a few bucks cheaper. The answer is the features. I see it as an upgrade to the Arduino Uno. It has all the features labeled with arrows. Some are subtle like the micro USB port, as many of us have smart phones that uses the same plug, option for soldering male headers parallel to female ones and the convenience of the already built in ports form I2C and serial data.

The major ones are really blessed by me. The 3.3V – 5V logic switch is priceless because so many arduino peripherals and mostly sensors work with 3.3V. I wasn’t aware about this a few years ago, as 5V stood to me as a standard but really a lot of sensors work with 3.3V and the most of 5V ones can operate with that voltage without any problem. Refer to the sensors datasheet for that information.

This board will work on 3.3V great with one of our I2C sensor and the other one that operates with 5V. Also some of the bluetooth modules work with 5V, but the logic works with 3.3V. I will address this topic in the bluetooth step of this tutorial.

ATtiny85 based mini weather station

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This Instructable describes a mini weather station using ATtiny85 and DHT11 sensor. It consists of TX and RX units with a 433MHz RF link to connect them. The TX unit sends temperature and humidity measurements to RF module, which then displays the data on an LCD.

Mini weather station

Mini weather station

In a recent instructable Indigod0g described a mini weather station that works pretty well, using two Arduinos. Maybe not everyone wants to sacrifice 2 Arduinos to get humidity and temperature readings and I commented that it should be possible to do a similar function with two Attiny85’s. I guess talk is easy, so I better put my money where my mouth is.

In fact, if I combine two earlier instructables I wrote:

2-Wire LCD interface for Arduino or Attiny
and
Receiving and sending data between Attiny85 (Arduino IDE 1.06)
then most of the work is already done. Only need to adapt the software a bit.

I chose for a two wire lcd solution with a shift register, rather than an I2C LCD because on the Attiny the shift register is easier to implement than the I2C bus.