Weather Monitoring System: A Project Report

A weather monitoring system can be described as a device or a tool, which can provide us information related to weather like temperature (can be in both Celsius and Fahrenheit), humidity, Barometric pressure etc. from old times to modern age it’s important to get data related to weather because it is used from agriculture to space science and plays a crucial role in many situation. For example, in forest and egg hatching industry measurement and control of weather is important so this system can be use anywhere to see the weather parameters. With the help of this system a user can see weather parameters from anywhere and at any time with the help of internet.

Introduction

In this project we have implemented a weather monitoring system with the help of raspberry pi and sending is data over cloud. Weather or Climate is an important part of human life. From centuries human observes weather condition. Weather parameters such as Temperature, Humidity, Pressure, etc. are paly an important role in various fields from agriculture to space science. So, to make this easy we have decided to develop an IoT instrument or device system which will automatically collect weather data and send it to the cloud, so it can be accessed from anywhere in.

Related Works

Kuang-Yow Lian et al. proposes a system which monitors the environmental parameters like temperatures, humidity, quality of air and the electric load. The system is implemented using smart phones. The developed system will also be able to measure the vibrations of operating machinery. For intelligent monitoring, ZigBee and Wi-Fi protocols are used. The integrated system made by 32-bit ARM module. The measurement results were displayed using the Android and web-based system. TCP/IP protocol has been used to transmit the data to a cloud device. Limitation- Zigbee, Wi-Fi and ARM based factory monitoring system is discussed, but the issue of cost and code size has not been tackled in this paper. It is not a cost effective solution.

Mohamed Hefeeda et al. in this paper a sensor network has been designed for observing early symptoms of fire in the forest. Fire weather index system is analyzed for this purpose. With the help of wireless sensor network efficient fire detection system has been developed. Limitation Paper discusses the use of fire sensor in forest, but doesn’t include other components for wild life security.

Proposed System

The project “The project weather monitoring system” is designed to give latest weather parameter data from any location. Sometime we are not able to go to a particular location again and again and take its weather parameters value. In such condition this system can be used to get the weather related data of a particular place. The project simply take weather data from its surrounding with the help of dht11 module and send it over thinspeak.

We plan to implement this project with the aid of Raspberry pi boards with the capability to perform IoT (Internet of Things) operations and also we are using thing speak API to send data over cloud which will can be seen from anywhere and also we can control it from anywhere with the help of VNC viewer and VNC server. For this we need to install VNC server on our raspberry pi and VNC viewer on our computer.

Hardware and Software Requirement

1. Raspberry pi 3: Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is a SOC (System on chip). It is a tiny computer board that comes with CPU, GPU, and USB ports, I/O pins, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB and network boot and can do some functions like a regular computer. B+ model is same as b it just has a POE hat. It also contains two extra USB port.
2. DHT11: This DHT11 Temperature and Humidity Sensor features a calibrated digital signal output with the temperature and humidity sensor complex. A high-performance 8-bit microcontroller is connected. It gives fast and accurate measurement of temperature and humidity.
3. Thingspeak: ThingSpeak is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that lets you collect and store sensor data in the cloud and develop IoT applications. With thingspeak we can analyse and visualize our data. Sensor data can be sent to ThingSpeak from Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other hardware. IDLE (short for integrated development environment or integrated development and learning environment) is an integrated development environment for Python, which has been bundled with the default implementation of the language since 1. 5. 2b1.
4. VNC Viewer: In computing, Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB) to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical screen updates back in the other direction, over a network. VNC is platform-independent there are clients and servers for many GUI-based operating systems and for Java. VNC was originally developed at the Olivetti & Oracle Research Lab in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The original VNC source code and many modern derivatives are open source under the GNU General Public License. There are many VNC servers we are using VNC viewer.
5. Raspbian OS: Raspbian OS is one of the official operating systems available for free to download and use. The Raspbian desktop environment is known as the “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” or in short LXDE.

Implementation

To Use Raspberry pi first we must prepare a SD card with installed Raspbian OS. To prepare SD card first format it and the copy all NOOBS file to in it After preparing SD card we have to boot it first time, for first time installation of OS it will take few minutes. After booting up the OS we have to do required setting and it will ready to work on. Then connect DHT11 sensor to raspberry pi and after running the programme it will display the data on terminal screen. On the same time it will also send the data to thingspeak and the data can be seen from anywhere, by the help of VNC server.

1. Component Description: The proposed system includes following components and also describe how the component will work. Raspberry Pi: Raspberry pi is the main unit of this system. With the help raspberry pi we are running the program to take data from DHT11 sensor and sending it to Thingspeak as well as displaying it on screen.
2. HDMI Display: To see the current status of the weather as well as the sensors (humidity, pressure, temperature) and also we will able to check the updates regarding Raspberry Pi.
3. DHT11 Sensor: With DHT11 sensor we are getting data related to temperature and humidity.
4. Python: Python is a very easy to work on and it is the recommended programming language for raspberry pi. That’s the reason we use python as a programming language for our project.
5. THINGSPEAK: With the help of Thingspeak we are displaying our weather report. Also, it has feature to choose to show data in both public and private view.
6. Channel view: ThingSpeak channels store data sent to them from apps or devices. We have created our channel as Weather Monitoring Channel.
7. Conclusion

In this paper, we introduced an easy and simple solution for low cost weather monitoring station that we developed. The main purpose was to design an easy to use weather monitoring system that can be used in agriculture, schools, forests and for some research purposes. By using the sensor for atmospheric temperature, humidity integration with raspberry pi 3, we created a model of the weather monitoring station. This system is the first step to development of easy to use, low cost and affordable weather monitoring system.