Wireless Weather Station gets Solar-Powered Supercap Upgrade

Supercaps are certainly not a drop-in replacement for rechargeable batteries, but it can get irritating having to climb onto a roof every few months to switch out the rechargeable batteries. My latest Ambient Weather station is using expensive single use batteries which last about 2 years, so I’m living with it, but my previous Acurite 5-in-1 station was also chewing through rechargeable batteries.

Supercaps do charge very quickly, and their lifetime use can be a good 30% or longer than rechargeable batteries. But they take up more space, and they discharge linearly, so other allowances need to be made for their use. But even so they may be worth considering for some use cases.

Using supercaps though for this weather station example, the monitoring device is showing that the supercaps were fully charged in just an hour and a half on a sunny morning, and maybe three or four times that on a dark and rainy day, which is pretty good.

See https://hackaday.com/2022/04/07/wireless-weather-station-gets-solar-powered-supercap-upgrade/

#technology #supercaps #weatherstation #PWS #batterylife
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SparkFun provides a very basic Weather Meter Kit for a DIY personal weather station

This is actually a very basic kit, containing just the sensors and mounting parts. It will produce the expected voltages, which you need to interpret, to read rainfall, wind direction, and wind speed. These are also the sensors which are the most specialised, as it is easy to source other sensors for temperature, air pressure, solar radiation, and even air quality (they do have some other sensors too for air pressure etc, but these need to be mounted in enclosures).

The intention is that this would operate with something like an Arduino (or a Raspberry Pi), which would measure the voltages and run the software to display output. On SparkFun’s site there is also a tutorial titled ‘Arduino Weather Shield Hookup Guide V12’ which gives a suggestion around components and software. It’s open source, so you can decide to do it any way you want to, and experiment with it.

See https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15901

#technology #PWS #weatherstation #opensource #sparkfun
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