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Another RPi-based solar powered weather station

Posted on August 18, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

Brian Masney from Morgantown, WV has designed a full-featured solar powered weather station that includes sensors for measuring rain, wind, temperature, humidity, and pressure. It runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero running the latest Raspbian Testing Lite and is powered by a 6600mAH 3.7V lithium ion battery that is charged using a 6V 9W solar panel.

Solar powered weather station

The solar panel is attached to the top of the project box using several large pieces of Velcro. More information about the solar setup can be found on Adafruit’s Website. Be sure to connect the PowerBoost 1000 to the battery charge output pins; not to the load terminal. This is because the solar panel can put out 6V however the PowerBoost can only accept a maximum input voltage of 5.5V. See this post on the Adafruit forums for more details. There should not be anything hooked up to the load terminal on the charger. I fried a Pi Zero and a PowerBoost 1000 on a bright, sunny afternoon with the PowerBoost hooked up to the load terminal.

To reduce the power usage of the Raspberry Pi, the LED and display on the Pi was disabled. powertop --auto-tune was used to enable other power saving features. See the files systemd/power-savings.service and bin/power-savings for details. The power requirements could be reduced even further by desoldering the various LEDs on the solar charger and PowerBoost 1000.

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Mini weather station using Raspberry Pi

Posted on November 24, 2015 by R-B Leave a comment

Jeremy Morgan‘s mini weather station is IoT enabled and uses Raspberry Pi to measure temperature, humidity, atmospheric Pressure, and light intensity in Lux. It is capable to send the results to Google Spreadsheet on your Google Drive or an ASP.Net Web API on your website.

Raspberry Pi powered mini weather station

Indoor ambient quality monitor

Posted on August 7, 2015 by R-B Leave a comment

Davide Gironi‘s ambient quality monitor uses Arduino and a bunch of sensors to monitor four indoor environmental parameters, namely temperature, humidity, noise and illumination. The measurements are recorded on to the xively.com platform, as well as displayed locally to the user through 4 bi-color led indicators.

Indoor ambient quality monitor

Noodle: A new robotic sensing project using Raspberry Pi

Posted on April 21, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Noodle is a Raspberry Pi based prototype machine that has capabilities of sensing the surrounding space with its audio and video sensors, and of reacting to the sensed activities in the vicinity. The Noodle can respond with words, images, and sounds, and can also be programmed to take decisions, if required. The Noodle is Wifi-enabled and uses a camera and a microphone for visual and audio sensing. This instructable describes the construction of Noodle, including setting up the Raspberry Pi, connecting all the electronics, and creating the enclosure. While Noodle is currently in an early stage with the basic framework and enclosure ready, I believe it has a lot of potential, which is yet to be explored.

Noodle: A Raspberry Pi based robot

Arduino basic I/O learning shield

Posted on April 16, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Jesus Echavarria, an electronic designer from Spain, has informed us about his K4S Keyboard project, which is a basic I/O shield specially designed for learning Arduino Programming using the Scratch for Arduino (S4A) platform. S4A is a modified version of the MIT’s Scratch Project and supports interactive Arduino programming through drag and place blocks.

K4S educating shield

The design of K4S board is simple and contains three 10mm LEDs, three tact switches, one potentiometer, and one Piezo buzzer. It can be used for educating kids the basics of Arduino programming using S4A. Experiments that can be done with this shield include basic digital input and output, analog sensing, light dimmer using PWM, and generating sound.

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