Project: Autonomous weatherstation node (bachelor assignment)
This is my bachelor assignment about building a autonomous weatherstation node for in the city of Enschede.
Project goal
The goal of the project was to make a sensor node that could track environmental variables in the city of Enschede related to the urban heat island effect. The stage of my assignment was to find a balance between the cost and performance of the sensors within a budget of 400 euros. The variables that had to be measured were; Temperature, humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation. It also had to be battery-powered without interference (charging by someone) and send its data wirelessly. An existing sensor node was used as a reference for all the sensors namely the Davis Instruments vantage pro.
Project execution
For the project, I designed a housing that was 3D printed and chose weatherproof connectors to swap sensors. I wrote the code to read the sensors and send data both over LoRaWAN and WiFi since the LoRaWAN gateway on campus broke during the sensor testing. And I have tried to interface sensors that were not meant to be used for DIY stuff to use on my own controller. The digital sensor not being successful, since a nonstandard communication standard was used.
Project result
In the end, I designed the weather station so it could easily swap sensors to make testing other sensors in the future easier. This meant that the housing was big, and not useable in the field. Since there are lots of connectors to connect sensors, more than the number of sensors that would be needed at one time. But also lots of space on the housing to attach sensors that could be taken off en placed on. I also did some tests against the Davis Instrument weather station to see how my sensors performed.