Monsoon season is rapidly approaching. Last year my neighbors were heavily affected by the weather when we received over a foot of rainfall in just a few hours. Flooding was well over 8 feet in some low lying areas. For my neighbors down the road, who park under their apartment complex, over 30 vehicles were lost during the storm.
In an effort to help my neighbors, I am working on an early warning storm detection system. Ultimately, I have two separate projects in mind: a weather station and a storm warning sentinel. As alluded to in my previous post on project management, I have split the ultimate goal of the early warning detection system up into the two separate projects. The prerequisite steps learned in the weather station project will enable the storm warning sentinel project.
Today marks an exciting day for The Engineer's Workshop. Today, I am kicking off a new feature of this blog- a recurring series of projects. Each project will start with a design overview followed by a timeline of the intermediate steps devised to build the project. Subsequent posts for the project will then be dedicated to each intermediate step. Let's get started on building our weather station!
The first step you should take on any engineering project should be researching the design. Time spent designing your project up front will pay dividends later. When I design an engineering solution, I start off with clearly defining the goal. After that, I define the requirements/criteria. With microcontroller projects such as this, I also explicitly list the inputs and outputs involved so that I don't forget them in my design. In the case of this weather station project, I came up with the following design overview:
I am a visual thinker so I also like to sketch out a rough high-level design:
The design I've come up with is that I will have an outdoor weather monitoring station which will transmit (over LoRa) to a listening station I have indoors. The listening station will be connected to a web/SQL server via wifi. Any information it receives from the weather monitoring station, it will turn over to the SQL server for storage.
With the above design for my weather station, the project checkpoints easily reveal themselves:
Breaking down the project, we see the following steps are necessary:
- Create a web dashboard to display the data
- For this, I have chosen to use Django
- Interface basic sensors with ESP32 for the Weather Monitoring Station
- Interface listening Station with SQL Server to log data
- Connect Weather Monitoring Station to Listening Station via LoRa
- Polish Django dashboard
Stay tuned! In subsequent posts, we will build out each objective in turn.