Cumulus Support

Hi all

My Maplin cheapy station has finally given up after 5 years with the dreaded constant red led so i was thinking of using the parts to make my own system.

My idea is to use ESP8266 wifi boards which has a programmable MCU for each area of the station. Each board would be responsible for a separate area of information e.g. Wind (anemometer and direction vane), air (temp and humidity) etc... and each would have a built in VERY basic webserver for retrieval of values. With rechargeable batteries and a small solar panel per unit it should be completely self contained for years at a time.

Server side I plan on using a Raspberrry Pi to enable long term logging and more flexibility.

Is my idea feasible?

Not sure I would bother when this is available https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=12083 as this does it all and allows use of the Fine Offset modules.

Hi,

Indeed, why reinvent the wheel?

However, my main "concern" with the Weatherduino transmitters is their rather high (solar) Power Budget, for the higher latitudes such as the UK. Around a 50 watt (rated) panel (that's several square feet) and a SLA battery have been suggested in this thread. I suspect there might be similar (or worse) issues using the ESP8266.

Personally, I'm looking more at a dedicated low power microcontroller (PIC) and one of the modern 3.3 volt highly-integrated UHF (434/868 MHz) transceiver modules such as the HC-12. Currently (in December) my "test bed" battery (a single AA cell) is still "topping out" almost every day, from a 250 mW PV panel (~15 sq cms).

But I still have decide whether to port the (Arduino) "virtualwire" protocol onto the new processor, or adapt the receiever protocol as for the "AuriolDiuino" version.

Cheers, Alan.