Categories
Ham Radio outdoors

Weather station

[Today’s run: 4 miles]

My government surplus weather stations (3) arrived yesterday.  I have tried two of them out and they seem to work fine.  They came with some mounting hardware, a manual, and a couple different cables for connecting/configuring.  It looks like I can also use my own cable for attachment.

Data comes out in ASCII strings on an RS-232 serial connection.  It can be configured to send European or US units (F/C, in/mm, etc).  There are sensors for wind speed and direction, temp, humidity, pressure, rain/hail.  They include a heater circuit to keep the rain sensor from icing up.  Pretty cool stuff.

Now I have to figure out what kind of user interface I want to use.  I think I would like to create a simple LCD display which shows the temp, wind, etc.  Then I would like to go wireless.  Wireless would mean also coming up with a non-wired power source like solar and/or batteries?  Lots of ideas.  Wouldn’t it be cool to have an autonomous weather station out in the yard that talked html over wifi?  Then I could bring up a web page on my computer and show the current readings, etc.  I don’t know if I will get that far.

Vaisala WXT520

PDF Datasheet