Outdoor Monitoring System Known as Weather Canvass

Overview

The project features the Weather Canvas homemade weather station as an outdoor wireless weather monitoring system together with an indoor LED display.

Explanation

The design of the project was a combination of several core components wherein the most important feature is the RF communication between the outdoor and indoor unit. The outdoor systems comprises of a microcontroller, humidity sensor, homemade anemometer, a solar panel for measuring sunlight and charging the microcontroller’s power source, modified Hot Wheels radar gun for measuring precipitation, and temperature sensor.

The system transmits that data it has collected once per minute to the indoor microcontroller using a 433MHz RF signal. This signal is decoded and the information is displayed as a sequence of five vibrant images on the 8x8 RGB LED matrix. Pulse width modulation is being used by the indoor system for providing millions of potential colors teach pixel wherein limitless image possibilities are allowed. The system chooses the images depending on the weather conditions transmitted.

The data path starts at the sensors whose information is collected by the outdoor MCU and relays this information indoors with the RF encoder/transmitter. The data is unpacked by the receiver/decoder.