IoT Based Weather Station

Associate Professor Dr. Neha Agrawal, IT Department, Maharaja

Agrasen Institute of Technology, New Delhi

ABSTRACT
The system proposed in this paper is an advanced solution for monitoring the weather
conditions at a particular place and make the information visible anywhere in the world. The
technology behind this is Internet of Things (IoT), which is an advanced and efficient solution for
connecting the things to the internet and to connect the entire world of things in a network. Here
things might be whatever like electronic gadgets, sensors and automotive electronic equipment.
The system deals with monitoring and keeps track of temperature, humidity, wind speed and
direction, rainfall amount etc. The system displays these readings in real time on a display. It
also keeps track of historical information on an hourly and daily basis. This data can be display
on LCD and sends the information to the web page and then plot the sensor data as graphical
statistics. The data updated from the implemented system can be accessible in the internet from
anywhere in the world.

1. INTRODUCTION
The importance of weather monitoring is existed in a lot of ways. The weather parameters are required to
be monitored to sustain the development in agriculture and to ensure the safe working environment in industries,
etc. The primary motivation behind taking up this project is the large utility of the wireless weather monitoring in
varied areas ranging from agricultural growth and development to industrial development. The weather conditions
of a
field can be monitored from a distant place by farmers and won’t require them to be physically present there in order
to know the climatic behavior at the location by using wireless communication. Due to technological growth, the
process of reading the environmental parameters became easier compared to the past days.
The sensors are the miniaturized electronic devices used to measure the physical and environmental
parameters. By using the sensors for monitoring the weather conditions, the results will be accurate and the entire
system will be faster and less power consuming. The system proposed in this paper describes the implemented flow
of the weather monitoring station. Sensors are essential components in many applications, not only in the industries
for process control but also in daily life for buildings safety and security monitoring, traffic low measuring, weather
condition monitoring and etc. In weather monitoring, for instance, parameters such as temperature and humidity thus
sensors have always been given the task for doing so. The advancement in technology has made these small and
reliable electronic sensors capable of monitoring environmental parameters more favorably. Kang and Park (2000)
and Oldham Et al., (2000) have developed monitoring systems, using sensors for indoor climate and environment
based on the parameters mentioned.
The system monitors the weather conditions and updates the information to the web page. The reason
behind sending the data to the web page is to maintain the weather conditions of a particular place can be known
anywhere in the world. The weather condition is also displayed on the systems LCD. The system consist of
Temperature and Humidity sensor combined which is Hygroclip, wind direction sensor which is Potentiometric
wind vane, wind speed sensor which is Three Cup chopper Anemometer and rain quantity sensor which is Rain
Gauge. This sensors are standard sensors which are used in IMD (India Meteorological Department) for weather
Forecasting. We get all this sensors from IMD, Pune. All this sensors can measure the corresponding weather
parameter. The system is intended to use in hill station large residential buildings and manufacturing industries. The
system is including with a microcontroller to process all the operations of the sensors and other peripherals.

The wireless communication standard was chosen in our system by analyzing the requirements of the
application, that the weather conditions should be monitored and updated all the time continuously. There are many
local area network standards for communication, but they are all standalone communication processes and
completely localized communication. In our application, we have to make the weather condition of a particular place
can be informative anywhere worldwide. The other communication technologies like ZigBee, RF Link can make the
communication nearly in the same range of Wi-Fi but they can’t broadcast the information as they can only
communicate peer to peer therefore we are using GPRS module as our communication device of system. The World
Wide Web (www) needs to have one client – server configuration for communication. It client needs to be
connected to the server with its IP address which can be universally accessible. The GPRS module at certain period
of time updates the information to the web page through the server. The system is equipped with all sensor devices
should acts as client to send the data to the web server. For establishing a connection between the sensor network
and internet, we used a GPRS module as an additional communication interface controlled by the microcontroller. A
GPRS module requires a source of internet connection with the help of SIM card. Once configuring the GPRS
module with an internet source, it acts as client and sends the sensor data retrieved by the microcontroller and we
can access it from anywhere using internet. The idea of connecting all the sensors to the internet is Internet of
Things (IoT).

1.1 Internet of Things (IoT)

It is the future technology of connecting the entire world at one place. All the objects, things and sensors
can be connected to share the data obtained in various locations and process/analyses that data for coordinating the
applications like traffic signalling, mobile health monitoring in medical applications and industrial safety ensuring
methods, etc. As per the estimation of technological experts, 50 billion objects will be connected in IoT by 2020.
IoT offers a wide range of connectivity of devices with various protocols and various properties of applications for
obtaining the complete machine to machine interaction.

The traditional technologies like home automation, wireless sensor networks and control systems will
become more efficient and smarter due to involvement of IoT. IoT is having a wide range of application areas. Such
as Medical applications for monitoring the health of a patient and sends the information wireless. The present
developing Wearable instrumentation is also based on IoT. The example wearable instrumentation is Smart wrist
bands, navigation pills, etc. All this methods require an internet interface to update the health info or to control the
device with a smart phone. The IoT also plays a vital role in media applications for advertising and exchanging the
information worldwide. The manufacturing processes also require IoT for supply chain management, digital control
systems for monitoring the manufacturing processes. The space requirements of IoT technology, the geographical
specifications are always important in case of tracking applications. The geographical dimensions of objects are also
important while obtaining the data from the objects. IoT in automobile applications and traffic maintenance became
a most using area of automation. The automated devices in a vehicle should be connected to a cloud to update the
car health within a period of time. By connecting the vehicles and traffic signaling systems to the internet, people
can easily find the shortest path for their destination from the traffic monitoring systems and can navigate
automatically by checking all other directions.

2. LITERATURE SURVEY

The survey has firstly done on standard technologies to establish a standard sensor network. Study went on
choosing the suitable standard sensors. It should be suitable in all aspects like economic and technological. The
primary concern we have to make while choosing the communication method is range of communication. Here we
have chosen SIM800L GPRS module. When we are giving an internet source, the data can be exchanged anywhere
in the world through its IP address. The further study has done on selecting the microcontroller. The system
implementation is contained with a hidden goal of achieving low power consumable solution. The microcontroller
should be also low power consuming alongside all the remaining sensors also low power consuming. We have
chosen LPC2138, which is low power microcontroller and works with only 2.0V to 5.5V.
 The next study went for data logger to store the output data of sensors. The data collected from the sensors
is mostly in the form of integer values representing the value of environmental parameter. After storing the data in
EEPROM as data logger then with the help of IoT the data of EEPROM is also stored on the web page. EEPROM is
our temporary storage on system. The web page displaying the data of sensors directly will not make a simpler
impression for the users. It should be in a graphical representation for easy understanding of the users. The data
hosted on an own web page will be more expensive and have to pay for it in a rental basis. To make the system less
expensive, we preferred some free data hosting web sites that provides a cloud space for our sensor data to make it
universal and also makes the system less expensive.

3. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

The implemented system consists of a microcontroller (LPC2138) as a main processing unit for the entire
system and all the sensor and devices can be connected with the microcontroller.

Fig-1: Block Diagram of IoT based

The sensors can be operated by the microcontroller to retrieve the data from them and it processes the analysis with
the sensor data and updates it to the internet through GPRS module connected to it. In the above block diagram,
there it is showing the main elements in the proposed system.

3.1 LPC2138

A 128-bit wide memory interface and a unique accelerator architecture enable 32-bit code execution at
maximum clock rate. For critical code size applications, the alternative 16-bit Thumb mode reduces code by more
than 30 % with minimal performance penalty.

3.2 GPRS Module

SIM800L is a quad-band GSM/GPRS module, that works on frequencies GSM850MHz, EGSM900MHz,

DSC1800Mhz and PCS1900MHz. SIM800L features GPRS multi-slot class 12 / class 10 ( optional ) and supports
the GPRS coding schemes CS-1, CS-2, CS-3 and CS-4. With a tiny configuration of 15.8*17.8*2.4mm, SIM800L
can meet almost all the space requirements in user applications, such as smart phone, PDA and other mobile devices.
SIM800L has 88pin pads of LGA packaging, and provides all hardware interfaces between the module and
customers’ boards.
SIM800L support 5*5*2 keypads, one full modem serial port, user can configure two serial ports, one
USB, the USB interfaces can debug, download software, audio channel which includes two microphone input; a
receiver output and a speaker output, programmable general purpose input and output. A major feature is SIM card
interface, support FM and one PWM.SIM800L is designed with power saving technique so that the current
consumption is as low as 0.7mA in sleep mode.
 Fig -2: SIM800LPin Details

3.3 Sensors
The system consists of temperature sensor, humidity sensor, wind direction sensor, wind speed sensor and
rain quantity sensor.

1) Hygroclip: Hygroclip is a combined sensor for both temperature and relative humidity. The basic sensor
for relative humidity is a thin polymer, which is having the property to absorb moisture from the air, and changes its
electrical permittivity in proportion to the relative humidity. Hygroclip requires +12V dc power at field. It has a
measuring range of 0-100% for relative humidity and -40 ◦C to 60 ◦C for temperature. Its output is 0-1000mV.

2) Potentiometric wind vane: The sensor used for measurement of wind direction is an IMD-make
potentiometric wind vane. The potentiometer in the wind vane is a servo-micro torque potentiometer and has a
maximum resistance of 10 kilo-ohms over an end gap of about 4 degrees. The variation of 0-360 degree corresponds
to 0 to 10 kilo ohms.

Table -1: Reading of Wind vane

Direction Resistance

North 0KΩ

East 2.5KΩ

South 5KΩ

West 7.5KΩ

3) Three Cup chopper anemometer: The sensor used for wind speed measurement is the IMD make
three-cup anemometer. The sensor is basically chopps IR beam using chopper tooth. System uses an optocoupler for
this purpose. No. of chopped electric pulses per min is proportional to the Wind speed. A Digital to Analog
convertor IC used in the Anemometer to give directly 0 to 4Volts DC for 0 to 100Knots Wind Speed.

4) Rain Gauge: The tipping bucket rain gauge consists of a funnel that collects and channels the
precipitation into a small seesaw-like container. After a pre-set amount of precipitation falls, the lever tips,
dumping the collected water and sending an electrical signal. An old-style recording device may consist of a pen
mounted on an arm attached to a geared wheel that moves once with each signal sent from the collector. In this
design, the wheel turns the pen arm moves either up or down leaving a trace on the graph and at the same time
making a loud click. Each jump of the arm is sometimes referred to as a 'click' in reference to the noise. The chart
is measured in 10-minute periods (vertical lines) and 0.4 mm (0.015 in) (horizontal lines), rotates once every 24
hours, and is powered by a clockwork motor that must be manually wound.

4. SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY
 Fig- System Functionality

The system functionality includes the working process of the entire system after integrating all the
peripherals along with software. The system works in three phases, one is reading the data from the sensors, and
another one the data stored in EEPROM and finally one is sending the data to the server (web page).

The output of sensors some of them are analog and some are directly gives the digital output. The analog
output of sensors through the ADC converted into digital form. This part of process done by the data acquisition
block of our system. Gathering all this data in EEPROM through microcontroller. The obtained sensor values will
be displayed on LCD and sent to the server and a plot can be drawn in the channel by considering the given sensor
values as Y axis and time and date as X axis. The only limitation in updating the values is on wed page can be
updated once for 10 minutes.

5. CONCLUSION

The research and implementation of a system for monitoring the environmental parameters using IoT
scenario is accomplished. The system provides a low power solution for establishing a weather station. The system
is tested in an indoor environment and it is successfully updated the weather conditions from sensor data. It is also a
less expensive solution due to usage of low power wired sensors and SoC contained GPRS module.

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