Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences ISSN: 0974-2115

IOT Based Smart Weather Station Using Raspberry-PI3

K.N.V. Satyanarayana*, S.R.N. Reddy, P.V.Y.N Sai Teja, MD. Basit Habibuddin
Department of ECE, SRKR Engineering College, Bhimavaram,
*Corresponding author: E-Mail: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Weather condition places an very important role in our daily life. Collecting of data about the different
parameters of the weather is necessary for planning in home and environments. Recent developments in Internet of
Things made possible to collect the data in-situ. The paper proposes a system that monitors weather parameters at a
place and presents the data as per the user’s need. The user can access this data anywhere in the world, at any time
through internet.
The proposed system uses Raspberry-pi embedded with sensors that collect weather parameters. The
collected data is uploaded to cloud for further access.
KEY WORDS: Raspberry-pi3, Temperature & Humidity Sensor, anemometer, rain gauge, wind vane, Internet of
Things, Wi-Fi.
1. INTRODUCTION
An automated weather station is a device that is used to measure and record the known parameters of
atmosphere without involvement of humans. The weather conditions are required to be monitored to maintain the
healthy growth in crops and to ensure the safe working environment in industries, etc. 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
(Susmitha and Bala 2014). It includes the wireless communication technology IEEE 802.11 b/g (Wi-Fi) for
communication. The system monitors the weather situations 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 system consists of wind velocity and wind direction, rain gauge, temperature and
Humidity sensor, and light dependent resistor. All these sensors measures the corresponding weather parameters.
The system is intended to use in large residential buildings and manufacturing industries.
The system is including a raspberry-pi3 for processing the operations of the sensors and other peripherals.
The wireless communication standard for the system was decided by analyzing the requirements of the application,
that the weather conditions should be monitored and updated all the time continuously. In our application, we have
to make the weather condition of a particular place can be informative anywhere worldwide. The measured
parameters can be stored in a cloud and can be download a remote location via a communication link. If the data is
stored in a cloud, recorded data must be physically downloaded to a computer at a later time for further processing.
The system is equipped with all sensor devices which should acts as client to send the data to the web server. For
establishing a connection between the sensor network and internet, Wi-Fi router was additionally used which is
controlled by the raspberry-pi3. A Wi-Fi module requires a source of wireless internet connection. Once configuring
the Wi-Fi module with an internet source, it acts as client and sends the sensor data retrieved by the user device like
a mobile application. The criteria of connecting all the sensors to the internet is Internet of Things (IoT). The concept
of connecting the electronic devices, sensors, and automobile equipment together via internet.
In any industry during certain hazards it is very essential to monitor weather. The fundamental aim of this
paper is to develop an IoT (internet of things) system to design a weather monitoring system which enables the
monitoring of weather parameters in any industry. The data from the sensors are collected by the raspberry-pi3 and
also raspberry-pi3 sends the sensors data in to the cloud by using the link space and this module will keep the data.
The system uses a compact circuitry built around raspberry pi-3.
Related Works: So far the weather monitoring systems mainly focused on the temperature, humidity and rainfall
measurements (Jadhav, 2016). There are systems which measure the atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity
and display the results on a LCD screen (IJARCCE 2016). In another system they also measured temperature,
humidity and barometric pressure and displayed the results on a GUI in a MATLAB platform and it seems to be
more complex (Lanre Joseph & Umoru Sam 2012). We here also concentrated on the monitoring of wind parameters
such as wind velocity and wind direction. For this we made use of raspberry pi3, which has 802.11 wireless LAN,
and processing speed of this system is more than other previous systems. The data can be linked directly to the cloud
via internet, so that we can access the information of these weather parameters from anywhere globally.
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 linked for sharing the data collected at various locations and process the data for
coordinating the applications like traffic signaling, 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
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 Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences ISSN: 0974-2115
IoT by 2020. 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. The
World Wide Web (www) needs to have one client – server configuration for communication. If client needs to be
linked to the server with its IP address which can be universally accessible. The traditional technologies like home
automation, wireless sensor networks and control systems work efficiently and smarter due to involvement of IoT.
IoT has a wide range of application areas such as Medical applications where health of the patient can be monitored
and the information is sent wirelessly. The present developing Wearable instrumentation like Smart wrist bands,
navigation pills, is largely based on IoT. All these methods require an internet interface to update the health info or
to control the device with a smart phone.
An IoT platform facilitates in developing, deploying, and managing IoT and M2M applications. It also
automates processes and manage network connections, storing of the data collected from the sensors, connecting and
controlling your devices, and analyzing the data. Another popular application of IoT is media applications where it
serves as a platform to advertise and exchange of information worldwide. In manufacturing processes, IoT is effective
for supply chain management, 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 to their destination from the traffic monitoring systems and can
navigate automatically by checking all other directions.
By connecting this weather station to the internet, the IoT can be made much more extensive in predicting
and knowing the weather data in particular place. The mobile app and thing speak database to store and share the
weather data are key ways to associate the weather station with the internet of thing. IoT applications gather more
data compared to traditional batch processing. Having capabilities for streaming data continually is key to reliably
feeding real-time business processes and extracting timely insights.

Figure.1. System Architecture

Literature Survey: Granted and implemented already an automated weather stations in Sri Lankan remote areas,
but until now not much concentration has been emphasized on making use of this kind of instruments to reduce the
effective cost. By interfacing meteorological parameter sensor is monitored to microcomputer/commercially
available data loggers with aid of communication devices or through parallel and serial ports, automated weather
stations have been developed in universities to obtain hard copies of weather data ((Lanre Joseph & Umoru Sam,
2012; Ramesh, 2016; Robotics, 2010). Recently, an automated weather station was developed by the University of
Colombo with a built-in data logging and USB communication facility.
The survey was firstly done on wireless technologies to establish a Wireless sensor network. Wireless
technology is chosen in this study due to its features like economic and technological. The primary concern, we have
to make while choosing the communication method is range of communication. 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi is considered.
When we give an internet source, the data can be exchanged anywhere in the world through its IP address. In future
study, microcontroller can be used. The system implementation is contained with a hidden goal of achieving low
power consumable solution. The raspberry should be also low power consuming alongside all the remaining sensors
also low power consuming. We have chosen raspberry-pi3 which is low power raspberry with inbuilt Wi-Fi and
works with only 3.3v. The next study went on the data logger methods on the web page. The data collected from the
sensors are mostly in the form of integer values representing the value of environmental parameter. 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 on a rental basis. To make the system less expensive, we preferred some free data hosting web sites
which provide a cloud space for our sensor data to make it universal and also makes the system less expensive.

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 Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences ISSN: 0974-2115

Figure.2. Flow Chart

Weather Sensors: Weather sensors consist of a wind speed meter, direction meter, rain gauge and temperature and
humidity. It can be considered as a one set. The anemometer is a wind speed meter, which encodes the speed of wind
by just closing a switch for every rotation. A switch closure once per second is produced by wind speed of 1.492
MPH. The rain gauge is built like as a bucket-type rain gauge with self-emptying facility, which will activate a button
closure momentarily for every 0.011" (0.2794mm) of rain that are collected. Finally, the wind vane is used to report
the wind direction which is produced by the combination of resistors inside the sensor. To any promising sixteen
positions, it is converted while applying the voltage. Design can be prepared as own or if it is bought then it can be
mounted on hardware. In this study the given hardware is utilized.
Raspberry-pi3:
Specifications
Processor : Broadcom BCM2387 chipset. 1.2GHz Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN
Power : Micro USB power socket 5V1, 2.5A
Memory : LPDDR2 1GB
OS : Running a Windows 10 IoT or Linux operating system version, boots from Micro SD.
Dimensions : 85 x 56 x 17mm
Power : Micro USB socket 5V1, 2.5A
Connectors
Video Output : HDMI (Composite RCA i;e NTSC and PAL and rev 1.3 and 1.4)
Audio Output : HDMI USB, 4 x USB 2.0 Connector, Audio Output jack 3.5mm,
Ethernet : 10/100 Base T Ethernet socket
Display Connector : Display Serial Interface, 15 way flat flex cable connector with a clock lane and two data
lanes.
GPIO Connector : 40-pin 2.54 mm (100 mil) Expansion header: 2x20 strip.Providing 27 GPIO pins as well
as +3.3 V, +5V and GND supply lines.
Camera Connector : MIPI 15 pin Camera Serial Interface (CSI-2)
Memory Card Slot : Micro SDIO.
Key Benefits: Low cost, Consistency in board format, 10 times faster processing speed, additional connectivity.
Key Applications: Cost effective PC/tablet/laptop, IoT application, Industrial/Home automation, Server/cloud
server, access point is wireless, Environmental monitoring (like as Weather Stations).

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 Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences ISSN: 0974-2115

Figure.3. Wind vane

Among three sensors, wind vane is maximum complicated one which consists of eight switches where each
connected to a different resistor. The vane magnet may close two switches at once, allowing up to 16 different
positions to be indicated. Voltage divider is designed by an external resistor which generates a voltage output where
analog to digital converter is used for measuring purpose. Figure 3 shows the switch and resistor arrangement. Table
present in figure 3 shows the resistance values for all 16 possible positions. Resistance values for positions between
those shown in the diagram are the result of two adjacent resistors connected in parallel when the vane magnet
activates two switches simultaneously
Anemometer: Wind speed is measured by the cup-type anemometer and it works by closing a contact as a magnet
moves past a switch. A wind speed of 1.492 MPH (2.4 km/h) causes the switch to close once per second. The
anemometer switch is connected to the inner two conductors of the RJ11 cable shared by the anemometer and wind
vane (pins 2 and 3).
Rain gauge: The rain gauge is built like as a bucket-type rain gauge with self-emptying facility, which will activate
a button closure momentarily for every 0.011" (0.2794mm) of rain that are collected. The rain gauge switch is
connected to the RJ11 two side conductors of terminated cable.
Temperature & humidity: This module will integrate the DHT11 sensor and other required components on a PCB.
The sensor, includes a resistive-type humidity measurement component, a high-performance 8-bit microcontroller
inside an NTC temperature measurement component, and it will provide a calibrated value of digital signal output.
It has excellent long-term stability and high reliability. In the laboratory, each DHT11 is calibrated strictly that is
extremely accurate on humidity calibration. Low power consumption, high amount of reliability and up to signal
transmission of 20 meter making it the best choice for several applications, including the most demanding ones. The
module is a 4-pin single row pin package.
Hardware Connections on Raspberry PI: You just need to use one GPIO pin, besides the VCC and GND to make
use of the DHT11 module on the Raspberry Pi.

Figure.4. Circuit representation

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 Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences ISSN: 0974-2115
2. RESULTS

Figure.5. Graphical representation of wind Figure.6. Graphical Representation of wind

direction velocity

Figure.7. Graphical Representation of rain gauge Figure.8. Graphical Representation of temperature

Figure.9. Graphical Representation of humidity

3. CONSLUSION
Since many years, various research operations are being performed in the field of weather monitoring. One
such good attempt is this i.e. to monitor the weather parameters in one locality and to share the data globally through
cloud. Thus in future, modifications can be made on this system to make it serve for other applications too.
We can add the new features like,
 Weather prediction is a very important factor, which forecasts the climate in a region based upon the values
of weather parameters. So the calculated results from this system can be made use in forecasting the weather
of that locality for a period of time.
 This mini weather can be made much more compact and reliable with the inclusion of miniature components
and by increasing the scaling factor.
 As we made use of Raspberry pi3 in this model, immediate alert message or e-mail can be sent to the mobile
phone, when the parameters changes are drastic.
 As the applications are limitless, other weather parameters can also be monitored easily with the addition of
related sensors to the system architecture.
 The technology changes day by day. Here in this, we make use of raspberry pi 3. In the future there will be
more advanced hardware on which we can implement this weather monitoring system (Kuruvadi Praveen &
Ankith Bala 2014).
 By including the sensors of soil moisture, PH values, and other we can use this in agricultural fields. So, that
it would be helpful to farmers to take care of crop yield.
 We can also implement an app which supports the android and other operating systems. So, that we can
check the data from anywhere at any time by using the internet. It is very easy to install the app and check
the data whenever we want. This will be more beneficial for everyone as in every home there is at least one
smart phone in these days.
 This mini weather station can be made much more compact and reliable with the inclusion of miniature
components and by increasing the scaling factor. Also, it is very economical so that with low cost we can
take the readings more accurate.
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 Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences ISSN: 0974-2115
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Fritschen L.J, A sensitive cup-type anemometer, Journal of Applied Meteorology, 6 (4), 1967, 695-698.
Jadhav G, Jadhav K and Nadlamani K, Environment Monitoring System using Raspberry-Pi, IRJET, 03 (04), 2016,
1168-1172.
Kuruvadi Praveen, & Ankith Bala, Modular weather and environment monitoring systems using Raspberry Pi,
International journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT), 2014.
Lanre Joseph O and Umoru Sam A, Design and Construction of a Low Cost Digital Weather Station, AUJT, 16 (2),
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Ramesh M, Jilani S.A.K and Arun M.S, An Automated Thing Speak Weather Monitoring System using Raspberry
PI, IJETT, 33 (2), 2016, 78-83.
Raspberry Pi Based Weather Monitoring System, IJARCCE, 5 (10), 2016.
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