Today we’ll be creating a remote controlled satellite weather station using a Raspberry Pi, a temperature sensor and a RockBLOCK. The envisioned application would be a weather station in a really remote location (i.e. outside of mobile/cellular coverage) – maybe in the middle of the desert, the jungle, or even the arctic – sending its data back to some kind of central weather system.
We’ll keep it really simple, using just one temperature sensor, but additional sensors could be added very easily to expand the scope – to measure humidity, atmospheric pressure or light levels. The temperature sensor used is a Maxim DS18B20 digital thermometer which provides a reasonably accurate reading (+/- 0.5 degrees) over a wide temperature range (-55 to +125C)
The weather station application will periodically transmit its sensor readings using the RockBLOCK. For those of you who don’t know the RockBLOCK, it’s an awesome little module that enables small amounts of data to be sent/received via satellite from anywhere in the world. Ideal for creating all manor of remotely deployed projects, like the weather station! We’ll be utilising the excellent pyRockBlock library (excellent, because it’s written by me!) to take care communicating with the satellites via the RockBLOCK.
The temperature sensor selected operates on the 1-Wire bus, which means it can be connected directly into the GPIO pins on the RPi, and with a little bit of configuration, can very easily be interrogated by Python – without the need for any additional electronics!
You can view the full project over at Makersnake.com (Remote Controlled Weather Station).
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