Ok, I am in the middle of working on a project and I decided I want to make one more expansion to it.
I am working on a weather monitoring system using an Arduino
Initially my plan was for having indoor and outdoor sensors to display temperature on an LCD or LED matrix marquee and have an ethernet shield to grab data from the local airport METARS data.
I want to do all that but I want to add a wireless element.
I want to be able to make an expandable wireless sensor network. at first I would like to add 3 wireless sensors that will transmit temperature data back to the main system to display and I would also like to add data logging to it.
Well, I am out of my element here.
I am probably biting off more than I can chew but I figure it will probably take me months to learn what I am doing and to get all the hardware I will need, and then just as long to get everything up and working.
So right now the help I am looking for is for information on what hardware I will need to begin the wireless sensor portion of the project.
The distances will all be relatively small nothing more than 100 feet through one or two walls.
Here is the big kicker. I need to be able to make sure the sensors can handle extremely cold temperatures. Down to -70F -57C
Power is not really a concern everywhere I am planning to put the sensors I have AC power available and can use wall wart power adapters optimally having them run off a USB power adapter would be perfect.
The sensors I would like to use digital sensors, but need to find something that will work at those same low temperatures. I like the DS18B20 But I worry about it's working range. For any of my indoor locations it will work fine.
So these are my thoughts on how I need to proceed.
1 - Figure out what additional hardware I need and purchase
2 - Learn to use wireless communications between sensors and central device
3 - incorporate wireless functionality into project already underway.
4 - Learn to datalog
5 - incorporate dataloging into current project
6 - learn to communicate with internet pulling data from web
7 - Incorporate internet data with current project
8 - Learn how to send data to the web so the data can be accessed by anyone with the address
9 - incorporate all aspects together.
I anticipate this project taking me 6 months or more before initial completion not including any changes I make before I get to that point.
This project is for my personal use not for commercial interest or anything just a challenge to myself.
So I am helping to find someone that would like to help me tackle this project that seems like a monumental task for me.
any advise and help is greatly appreciated.