2013 Texas Instruments India Educators' Conference

SOLAR POWERED WEATHER STATION AND RAIN DETECTOR

Arpita Ghosh, Abhay Srivastava, Atul Patidar, C.Sandeep, Shanthi Prince
Department of ECE, SRM University, Tamil Nadu
[email protected]
Abstract Benghanem’s [3] paper, the development of
wireless data acquisition system (WDAS) for
In this paper we have proposed a model weather station monitoring is described. It is
which acts as a weather station and a rain based on the Emitter/Receiver architecture
detector and is solely solar powered. The and it does not require the physical connection
model is designed in such a way that it can of the monitored systems to the data collection
be used remotely and the readings are server. Weather prediction facility through PC-
displayed on a user friendly LCD display based system [4] which monitors site-specific
and are displayed as digital numeric ground data augmented with satellite images
values. The weather station includes a were designed and reported.
remote station for monitoring the weather
powered by a solar panel, and a base 1.2 Organization of the paper
station to display data. The remote station
includes sensors to measure temperature, In Section 2 of the paper we discuss about
relative humidity, rain and solar radiation detailed explanation of each block diagram
level. The goal in system design is and the various initial conditions that were
optimizing cost and power. taken into consideration. The section 3 of the
report we give a detailed description of the
1. Introduction hardware and the software used in the project
along with algorithms demarcating each step.
With the rapid decrease in the natural The section 4 embarks upon the result
resources we are returning to renewable obtained from the project. The section 5 sheds
sources of energy for sustenance. Taking this light on the goals achieved after the
as the motivation for the project we used solar completion of the project.
power for powering the proposed model.
Features of our system are Low power, 2. Proposed Solution
Microcontroller based remote monitoring unit
which is solar powered, monitors site-specific The main intention of the proposed model was
data such as temperature, humidity, amount of to make a weather station which is powered by
rainfall and solar radiation level. renewable sources of energy. Hence we built a
solar powered weather station which can
1.1 Technical Background capture the various environmental factors and
send the reading back to the LCD for
The proposed model makes use of the clean monitoring.
and renewable source of energy such as the
solar energy as was used in the model The basic block diagram for the proposed
proposed by Iem Heng [1] using solar energy system consists of a Transmitter and a
to detect lethal and toxic gases in subways Receiver blocks that are connected wirelessly
and underground tunnels. Here we have used through an air interface hence reducing any
the solar workstation as remote weather further costs for wired connections.
monitoring station, monitoring temperature,
humidity, solar radiation level and also to
detect the amount of rain in that area. The
concept for rain detection was used in the
model proposed by Jing Xu [2] in which the
solar energy is not only used as a source of
energy but it also used a solar tracking
algorithm to detect rain for the prevention of
forest fire and to detect weather condition.
However, our model uses the solar energy
only as source of energy to activate our Figure 1 – System level block diagram
remote unit which is restricted to assessing
some environmental parameter as compared Figure 1 shows the system level block diagram
to former’s model’s applications. In of the proposed design.

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DOI 10.1109/TIIEC.2013.30
In the remote station side there is a solar panel processed so that it can be transmitted
which energizes the sensor board consisting of wirelessly through ZigBee module.
the sensors and the wireless transmitter
module (ZigBee based).

In the base station the wireless receiver

module (ZigBee based) receive the transmitted
data and sends to the low power
microcontroller (MSP 430) which drives the
LCD display unit.

The ZigBee module is mainly responsible for

the wireless transmission of the signal to the
receiver.
Figure 3 – Base station (Receiver block)
3. Implementation
In the receiver block (Figure 3) the base
3.1 Hardware Implementation station the main component is the MSP430
experimenter’s board with the LCD display.
The hardware basically consists oftwo main This unit is battery powered. Microcontroller
blocks as described in the previous section. unit with ZigBee module is connected to
The remote monitoring station (Figure 2) receive the transmitted data.
consists of solar panel, the sensor board, the
microcontroller and the ZigBee modules for the The access point (Base station) and End point
sheer purpose of transmission of the acquired (remote monitoring station) are coded to do
data in the proper format. their specified functions whose algorithm is
listed in the next section.

3.2 Software Implementation

The coding is done with the help of Code
Composer Studio v 5.3.0.00090 IDE. The
coding is done for MSP430F2274 uC (present
inside the eZ430 - 2500 target board) and for
the MSP430FG4618 uC(present inside
the experimenter`s board). EZ430- 2500
Target boards are used for both transmission
Figure 2 - Remote monitoring unit (Transmitter and reception through the ZigBee module. The
block) end point (EP) target board will gather the
information such as temperature, humidity and
The sensor board consists of three sensors LDR output through inbuilt ADC and using
namely LDR which is actually used for GPIO port 4 board will gather the rain water
detecting solar radiation level, humidity sensor, levels. These values are sent at regular
temperature sensor and a small circuit intervals by the CC-2500 module present
designed for rain level detection.The rain inside it. The receiver target board is
detection is done with the help of four rain programmed to receive values and these
detectors which are placed inside a graduated values are given out through the UART
container with each level demarcating 20ml at (UCA0TXD) out pin which is fed directly to the
each of the four levels. When the water UART input of the experimenter board. The
reaches the different levels in the module it experimenter board MSP430FG4618 is
short circuits the sensors and the level is programmed to get these UART values
detected. The temperature sensor measures through UCA0RX UART interrupt. The
the outside temperature and the result is sent valuesare updated at regular intervals using
to the receiver. The humidity sensor which is the timer interrupt, on the inbuilt board LCD.
also fitted on the board along with the other
sensors help in measuring the relative We are using TI’s Code Composer studio
humidity.The sensor board and the software for the access point coding and IAR
Microcontroller with the ZigBee unit is embedded workbench for end device coding.
energized with the help of the solar panel. The
sensor board is connected to the End point Coding:-
microcontroller where the acquired data is

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 ™ Firstly initialize the board support
package.
™ Then initialize communication port.
™ After waiting for a certain time interval,
read the sensor output values from
ADC.
™ Acquire the network ID.
™ Send the results through CC-2500.

Access Point Coding:-

™ Firstly initialize the board support

package. Figure 5 - Receiver side with the ZigBee
™ Then initialize communication port. module and the MSP430 experimenter board
™ Initialize network.
™ If a node is present, then the values The experimenter board has an LCD screen
are to be read on to array. where the temperature, humidity and solar
™ The sensor values are then displayed intensity values are displayed. Ambient
on the LCD. temperature is measured and display was
0
calibrated in C as shown in figure 6.
4. Result
The designed weather monitoring unit is kept
at a remote location for obtaining the various
environmental factors including solar intensity,
humidity and rain detection. The solar panel is
kept at an exposed area. The solar panel
energises the sensor unit and the transmitter
moduleZIGBEE eZ430RF2500T (figure 4).

Figure 6 – LCD displaying showing the

temperature in ⁰ C

Relative humidity level was displayed in

percentage as shown in figure 7.

Figure 4 - Transmitter side with our solar panel

and the sensor board

Then the data acquired is transmitted in the

required format. The values from the
transmitter module are transmitted wirelessly
to the receiver module (figure 5) Figure 7 – LCD display showing humidity
ZIGBEEeZ430RF2500T which is connected to
the MSP430FG4618/F2013 EXPERIMENTER Solar intensity level was classified into Low
BOARD. (L), Medium (M) and High (H) as shown in
figure 8.

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Figure 8 – LCD display showing solar intensity
as low

The rain detector gets short circuited when

rain falls on the detector present with the other
sensors. The amount of rain is then measured
seeing the calibrations at different levels at the
storage container. The amount of rain water
increases, the current increases. To simulate
the rain falling we poured water into the
detector unit and observed the change in the
received and displayed data. The rain level
was displayed as number of gradations the
water level has reached.

5. Conclusion:
The proposed model was successfully built
and tested. The remote station powered by
solar cell acquired the sensor data and
transmitted successfully. The base receiver
station received the data and displayed it one
by one as the LCD display had just 160
segments. Wind direction and speed could
also be incorporated. Further improvement can
be done by incorporating solar tracking unit, as
well as some energy storage unit for backing
up during cloudy weather. But the trade-off will
be the increase in the unit cost. With further
intelligence imparted to the system we can
even predict the weather using the site-specific
ground data acquired.

References
[1] Iem Heng; “Using Solar Robotic Technology to Detect
Lethal and Toxic Chemicals”; Global Humanitarian Technology
Conference (GHTC), 2011 IEEE on Oct. 30 2011-Nov. 1 2011.

[2] Jing Xu; “All-weather automatic solar tracking method

applied in forest fire prevention”; Electronic Measurement &
Instruments, 2009.ICEMI '09. 9th International Conference on
16-19 Aug. 2009.

[3] M. Benghanem, “A low cost wireless data acquisition system

for weather station monitoring”, Renewable Energy 35 (2010)
862–872.

[4] M. Salim etal, “The design of the weather ‘nowcast’ system”

Microprocessors and Microsystems, Vol.15 (3), April 1991

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