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Raspberry Pi Forum I'm a new maker and I need help determining what I need for my project.
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I'm a new maker and I need help determining what I need for my project.

mortslrak
mortslrak over 8 years ago

Hello everyone! I have a project in mind that I know is a little ambitious for my skill level (which is very minimal at the moment) and I thought that I would see if I could get a little help fleshing things out from the communinity and people who have more experience to point me in the right direction. I have a pretty good idea of what I want, I just need help picking what technology(s) would be the best to accomplish my project.

 

Simply put I want to make an indoor / outdoor weather station out of Raspberry pis (possibly with arduinos) where each pi is a remote station that sends its sensor readings to a central web service. I would ideally like to be able to see historic data as well. I assume that this will require the use of a database to really be able to store the data easily.

 

I know that I will need to know a decent amount of python / C++ for the Arduino and it can help for the Raspberry Pi (but isn't necessarily required).

 

I am also new to web development and know that there are a lot of ways to accomplish various tasks so I ask this; Which language(s) would best accomplish this? Would it be something like PHP and SQL? Ruby on Rails? Something else?

 

I have dabbled in a few (mostly older) languages but would say that I really don't know any so I'm completely open to whatever would work the best. I completely intend to learn what I need to accomplish this along the way. Any direction or suggestions would be incredibly appreciated. Please let me know if you have any questions that would help answer this.

 

Todd

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  • dougw
    0 dougw over 8 years ago

    A minimal system node would be an ESP8266 WiFi MCU plus a DHT22 weather sensor.

    Here is an example:

    Embedded Lab.

     

    Arduino Yun can handle it too:

    https://learn.adafruit.com/cloud-connected-weather-station-with-the-arduino-yun-and-temboo/introduction

     

    And so can a Raspberry Pi:

    http://makezine.com/projects/raspberry-pi-weather-station-mount/

    https://www.hackster.io/eursan/complete-wireless-weather-station-ece694

     

    and combinations:

    https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/tony-stark/iot-weather-station-910cae

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  • DaveMcLaughlin
    0 DaveMcLaughlin over 8 years ago

    A weather station is a good project and you can learn a lot by rolling your own and this what I used:

     

    ESP8266 as the weather station processor. BME280 for temperature, pressure and humidity and a dust sensor for air quality. Because of my location (20th floor of an apartment), no wind or rains sensors but they would be simple to add to the system. The DHT22 would be a poor choice and not very stable. The BME280 is little more expensive but has a super stable output. The Arduino drivers work on the ESP8266 without any changes.

     

    The ESP8266 talks MQTT protocol to a Raspberry Pi3 running Mosquitto and Node-red. Node-red acts as a basic web interface but I have a dual LCD unit with a clock on 1 display and the weather on the second display. Both are running a GHI Electronics G120 programmed in C# .NET Microframework. The software simply subscribes to the MQTT server and gets new data as the weather station publishes it to MQTT. In fact, any device on the MQTT network can get the weather data. It's a brilliant and easy protocol to work with and you never need to know the IP address of any of the devices on the network. The only requirement is that the MQTT server has a fixed IP address.

     

    By the way, if you use Node-red you can do the database logging without writing any Python code and just use MySQL. Simple Javascript coding within Node-red will be more than enough. Node-red makes life so easy. A great place to check it out is Peter Scargill's blog. http://tech.scargill.net

     

    This image shows the dual LCD display I have in my front room. The power data also comes from an ESP8266 on the network also sending out MQTT messages image

     

    image

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  • jpnbino
    0 jpnbino over 8 years ago

    Hi there,

     

    I recommend you to go for this course. It's cheap, quite easy to follow and will address almost everything you described

     

    https://www.udemy.com/rpi-full-stack/

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  • chekov
    0 chekov over 7 years ago

    Hi Todd,

     

    Not having done much programming recently, I chose to use a Raspberry Pi running Python, a BME280 sensor and  ThingSpeak to collect and trend the data and Twilio to send me text messages when things went south.

     

    Sifted through a bunch of online program listings and used or modified segments of the programs to datalog the indoor climate conditions on a minute by minute basis.

     

    Have fun!

    Jason

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