Added WOW factor

Published Dec. 23, 2022, 12:25 p.m. by tom

Curbar AWS is now logging data to the Met Office weather observations website. Hourly readings are being sent (10-minute interval data is available directly from our own site).

It was a simple job to write a Python script to upload readings. The main issue is converting the units to comply with the API specification.

At the same time, we've implemented a few software changes on the weather station end. These include better recording of slow wind speeds, a change to monitor the battery voltage on the station, and a facility to nudge the station clock up (or down) by a few seconds to keep it in sync with UTC.

The dull winter weather has caused a few problems with power. I've added a second solar panel (just for winter). Perhaps more importantly, I've tweaked the software to power down the LoRaWAN® modem (an RAK811) in between transmissions. There is still a bit of work to do on reducing consumption from the RPI Pico, and I'll get to that soon.

As always, the code for the weather station head end, the base station and this website is available on Github.

I'm slowly improving the documentation. The focus at the moment is documenting how to build the hardware pcb/veroboard layout.