Simple Arduino Weather Station Ideas

I am going to make a simple weather station as my first arduino project.

There are a few good reasons for choosing this as my first project

• It’s something I want and will find useful.
• There are a number of key areas I can figure out which will be useful in future projects such as using sensors and communicating with other devices.

Things I’d like to monitor:

• Temperature
• Humidity
• Light levels
• Rain?

I would like the weather station unit, which will be outside in the garden to communicate with a raspberry pi already set up in the house. The pi is attached to a webcam and  running motion and already working as a very basic security camera, basic because I haven’t done anything to optimise it’s use in the dark so at night, when a security camera would be most useful, it is pretty useless. Still it currently gives us the ability to check that the right number of vehicles are still on the drive when we are away from home!

The raspberry pi already has an MQTT server set up in the form of mosquitto which is working well and is currently being used to send alerts when the security camera is triggered. I am planning on using MQTT to communicate with the weather station when it is set up.

Photo by Mohammed Tawsif Salam – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20266892