SkyWeather2 - A Raspberry Pi WeatherSense Station Kit for the Cloud

The Raspberry Pi is a fabulous little computer. Inexpensive and easy to use and build projects with. What is one of the things that has been missing from the Raspberry Pi? The ability to very easily build (no soldering!) a weather station using this fine computer. This Kickstarter is a perfect technology project to learn all about the weather and how to sense the environment around you. Right here. Right in your neighborhood. Compatible with WeatherSense Sensors.

The heart of the new SkyWeather2 project is our new custom made wireless Weather Sensor package called the WeatherRack2.

The SkyWeather2 kit is so simple that even middle school children can build it with just a little adult help for configuration and installation.

This is a great beginning Raspberry Pi project. For the young or old.

This project allows you to build your own weather station with a SkyCamera to take pictures of your Sky and display them up in the cloud on WeatherSTEM. You might even make it to the WeatherChannel!

What is in a SkyWeather2 Kit?

SkyWeather2 Sensor Hat for the Raspberry Pi
SkyWeather2 Serial Number for connecting to WeatherSTEM
SDR Radio and Antenna
WeatherSense WeatherRack2
WeatherSense Indoor Temperature / Humidity Sensor
SkyCamera and Cables
Link to Step-By-Step Assembly, Test and Configuration Manuals
Link to 3D Print STL Files and Design Files for SkyWeather2 Case
The SkyWeather2 WeatherSense WeatherRack2

You supply your own Raspberry Pi and Power Supply

Downloads and Manuals

Software Status and Updates

Check the current Software status here on forum.switchdoc.com

Easy to Build!

Above is a picture of the full kit assembled in the optional 3D Printed Case. 4 Cables and 2 boards. That's it! Oh, wait. That's for the kit with the optional AQI (Air Quality Index) Sensor. The base kit is even easier and has 2 wires, one cable and a USB plug! That's easy to assemble.

Here is Bill's station on line:

And one of the coolest features of the SkyWeather2 system is that WeatherSTEM builds a time-lapse video of every day.

We provide the Python3 software all open source with the kit. The Pure Python software can be modified to add new sensors, support new cloud software and connect up to your own projects and software. Magic Mirrors anyone?

What can you Measure with SkyWeather2?

Barometric Pressure
Outside Temperature
Outside Humidity
Altitude
Inside Temperature (at up to 8 locations!)
Inside Humidity (at up to 8 locations)
Sunlight
UV Index
Wind Speed
Wind Gusts
Wind Direction
Rain
All your weather information on the Cloud including history

And optionally:

Air Quality - AQI (have your own local Air Quality Sensor)
ThunderBoard Lightning Detection! (coming soon)
Amazon Alexa Integration (coming soon)
Other cloud based displays (coming soon)

What is in a SkyWeather2 Kit?

SkyWeather2 Sensor Hat for the Raspberry Pi
SkyWeather2 Serial Number for connecting to WeatherSTEM
WeatherSense WeatherRack2
WeatherSense Indoor Temperature / Humidity Sensor
SkyCamera and Cables
Link to Step-By-Step Assembly, Test and Configuration Manuals
Link to 3D Print STL Files and Design Files for SkyWeather2 Case
The SkyWeather2 WeatherSense WeatherRack2

You supply your own Raspberry Pi and Power Supply

The SkyWeather2 Sensor Hat

The Software Defined Radio

A Software-defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication system where components that have been traditionally implemented in hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded system (still with significant hardware support).

Local Weather Displays on your Network

The SkyWeather2 software includes a dash_app that runs a browser based set of displays and graphs that can be accessed in your home network.

Blynk for your iPhone or your Android

Blynk is a great app that runs on your iPhone, Android and soon a version on a browser. It gives you current status of your station including solar power status, thermal status and current conditions.

Blynk QR Code

Below is the current Blynk QR code for the SkyWeather2 App

QR Code Version December 6, 2020

What about the Cloud?

SwitchDoc Labs is proud to announce our partnership with WeatherSTEM.com for taking SkyWeather2 to the cloud.

That's right. Your weather station and sky pictures will be visible to everyone on the Internet and you will be sharing your local weather with locations all over the globe!

WeatherSTEM is an innovative cloud-based weather education platform for people of all ages and professions. Our innovative curriculum is designed to help you and your students understand the myriad ways weather impacts just about everything in our lives. SkyWeather2 is a great way to become part of the WeatherSTEM community.

Note to Educators: WeatherSTEM has a full set of experiments and curriculum for your class to use SkyWeather2 and WeatherSTEM in the classroom.

3D Print STL Files and Design Files

We have included 3D Print STL Files and the Fusion 360 Design Files for you to print your own SkyWeather2 Case. We are offering early birds a SkyWeather2 3D Print as a special benefit. We also have the case available as an add-on.

Maximum Print Size: 195mmx115mmx50mm.

Science Behind The Project

For a little of the science and geeky end of things, we turn to our CTO, Dr. John Shovic for his comments about this Kickstarter.

"SkyWeather2, being open source, is very expandable - there are hundreds of Grove modules available!

We provide extra Grove connectors on the SkyWeather2 Hat for your own projects and sensors.

You can modify the software to do things we haven't even thought of yet!

The engineering on this project was great fun for the whole engineering team. Others handled the sensors and our manufacturers, but I was tasked with figuring out how to receive (demodulate) all the incoming 433MHz signals from the WeatherSense sensors. It was a heck of a challenge!

The first thing we did was to learn how to use a Software Defined Radio (SDR) on the Raspberry Pi. We started analyzing the signals coming into the antenna and figuring out what was going on. We had the digital data formats from our manufacturing partners but what it looks like coming in over radio waves was quite another challenge. We first decoded the simpler Indoor Temperature / Humidity Sensor (making sure we used the proper CRC checksum to guarantee correct reception - 433MHz is noisy and there are lot of other things on the frequency band such as your car key, garage door openers, etc., etc.). We used as a starting step a variety of tools on our Raspberry Pi (RF_Hacker and rtl_433 for two) and started to match the signals coming from the SDR to the digital bits. The coding uses something called Manchester Encoding which makes it difficult to read the signal data with just the eye. We wrote software to decode it and after a lot of effort, we were reading the Indoor Sensor and the WeatherRack2 correctly from the Raspberry Pi using our Software Defined Radio.

Receiving a Radio Packet with the Logic Analyzer in the SwitchDoc Lab

We had to look at the timing down on the order of about 200 usec. That is 200 millionths of a second! Using a Saleae Logic Analyzer, we figured out what parts were what and then wrote and modified software to get the data out of our sensors using an Arduino (which is a tiny computer compared to the Raspberry Pi!). Whew! One very odd thing we found out this way was the each Indoor Temperature/Humidity message sent each message three times, with no gaps (see picture) and our WeatherRack2 sent each message twice with a gap. Explained why we would pick up multiple transmissions with the Raspberry Pi SDR!

We are giving you all the source code for this project. We hope you enjoy using it and playing with it as much as we did! I love this stuff!"

SkyWeather2 - A Raspberry Pi WeatherSense Station Kit for the Cloud

What is in a SkyWeather2 Kit?

Related Links

Downloads and Manuals

Software Status and Updates

Easy to Build!

What can you Measure with SkyWeather2?

What is in a SkyWeather2 Kit?

The SkyWeather2 Sensor Hat

The Software Defined Radio

Local Weather Displays on your Network

Blynk for your iPhone or your Android

Blynk QR Code

What about the Cloud?

3D Print STL Files and Design Files

Science Behind The Project