DIY Weather Station v1.0-rc1

Ready! USB cable on the right is only for possible program code updates. Old USB cables were used as 4-wire sensor cables.

Darkness and humidity sensors:

Lightness sensor for lux readings:

IR-sensor for cloudiness readings:

Waterproof external temperature sensor:

Brains were built on top of Arduino Mega 2560 and ethernet shield:

RJ45 network cable with PoE is the only connection needed:

Little holes let moisture reach humidity sensor:

Station home page:

Public home page:

Surprise!

Hello! I'm your supercell heavyduty hyperdrive battery! I'm sorry that I'm so light and weak. I just couldn't live more that a couple of hours. Thanks for opening me.

ESP8266 Flashdance

I need some wireless APs for the forecoming projects so I made a flashing factory and reflashed several ESP-01 and ESP-03 modules in a row. Not all of them were succesfully reprogrammed so I had to revert back to the original firmware for some chips.

The factory (note the "program" and "reset" push buttons on the right):

Stock firmware:

After flashing:

DIY weather station 0.2 beta

Building the beast has begun. A waterproof project box is a must for this kind of gadget.

Good cables

I made a bunch of cables ensuring reliable DC power distribution for the mount, CCD camera, focuser, USB hubs, relays etc:

Message from Arduino

Arduino UNO R3 with SIM900 GSM Shield and prepaid SIM:

A simple sketch sent this SMS into my phone. Arduino succesfully received my replay back too.

Training Drift Alignment with SkyFi and Sky Safari

DIY weather station 0.1 beta

Weather station is network connected and gets all of it's power through a simple PoE adaptor.

Portable rain sensor sends it's data into the main unit via wireless link:

Weather station public homepage with graphics:

Weather station internal raw homepage:

Reborn GPS

This GPS is dead or I thought it was dead because it suddenly stopped sending NMEA data via USB a couple of months ago. Opening the enclosure and fiddling with the wiring and onboard battery somehow solved the problem. Now this Globalsat device is working again and is ready to serve as a reliable time source for my mounts.

Powerpoling everything

I'll give Anderson Powerpoles a try with my new permanent imaging setup.

Powering EQ mounts

Stepping up voltage a little bit from 12V into 14-15V seems to cure all problems with power.

GPS is ready!

Up and down

These low cost DC-to-DC voltage converters are a must in some DIY projetcs. The board on the left steps up voltage and the board on the right does it vice versa (steps voltage down).

DIY Weather Station

Next step in this project is preparing for permanent soldering. This time I feel myself quite lucky because I found several boards lying around suitable for  this task.