Development of a Low-Cost Arduino-Based Weather Station

Abstract

A weather station is a facility located either on land or sea consisting of instruments and equipment which can be used to measure atmospheric conditions so as to provide weather forecasts information and to study the weather. The existing instruments used for measuring the weather elements are expensive which led to the development of a low-cost Arduino-based weather station. The developed low-cost weather station consists of three separate modules which are data collection, data storage, and data communication. These modules communicate serially with each other and are controlled by three separate microcontrollers (Arduino Uno). The data collection module is interfaced with a set of sensors that collects temperature and humidity. The weather data were viewed in real-time through a graphical user interface (GUI) located at the central station. The developed weather station was able to measure the temperature and humidity of a controlled environment, giving the reading at interval of five minutes. It was observed that the average temperature from results obtained (27.360C) with the developed low-cost Arduino based weather station falls within the range of the Accuweather readings (24.00-28.000C). Also, the average humidity of the developed low-cost Arduino based weather station (80.41%) falls within the range of the Weatherspark humidity (78-82%) on 20th August 2019. Therefore, this system can be adopted as a weather station facility. The design can be extended to be web-based in the future to make it available worldwide.Keywords— Arduino Uno, Humidity, RF Transceiver, Temperature, Weather Station