Sensors installation and weather data reading by the Arduino platform: preliminary results of building a modular weather station.

Abstract

The measurement of meteorological variables is a growing need since many human activities require the knowledge, and sometimes, forecast of these data. To address this concern, weather stations were created. By being refined over time, these weather stations are currently automatic, having high precision and sampling. The problem that these improvements bring is a high cost to the equipment, preventing its use in many fields of research. To solve this problem, this paper works on creating an affordable automatic weather station model, verifying its reliability in comparison with the data generated by a conventional weather station. To achieve this goal, the Arduino platform was chosen. The Arduino has been developed to the use in the academic community, justifying the open-source philosophy behind it. To work with the Arduino in this application, the use of weather measuring sensors is needed. Currently, the project has already integrated temperature, humidity and luminosity sensors. In addition to those, the developed station has a module for data storage (by SD cards) and an RTC (Real Time Clock). In spite of being in test, the station already has an optimistic future, since it has a notable cost difference that represents 4% of the market price. Although the functionality of the sensors on the weather station has being proved, the data generated by them is still in tests in terms of reliability compared to those generated by a conventional weather station.