SCHOOL OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND

COMPUTER SCIENCES NUST

PROJECT REPORT

DEGREE: MS CS 2024
COURSE: INTERNET OF THINGS

Group members: Reg no:

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Title: IOT Based Live Weather Monitoring
System
Introduction
Now a days weather monitoring is essential for various applications, including agriculture, disaster
management, and smart city development, in fact, now a days the IOT can be used in every industrial
aspect. Traditional weather monitoring solutions are often expensive and lack real-time capabilities. With
the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), weather monitoring has become more accessible, scalable, and
efficient. In this project we have aimed to develop simple and efficient real time weather monitoring using
esp-8266 and sensor used is DHT-11. The integration of the firebase with an app provides real time data
monitoring.

Objectives:
• Development of real time weather monitoring system using nodemcu (esp8266) which is low
power and has low latency.
• Use of some back-end cloud-based service to store data from sensors as esp 8266 does not
contain much data.
• Integration of cloud-based service with an app to provide real-time data presentation on your
mobile phone.

Expected Outcomes:
Our expected outcomes were the development of low power IOT based weather monitoring
system and presentation of data on app, so have we have achieved the later one but due to Wi-
Fi we could not achieve the low power objective.

Application Requirements:

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Hardware requirements:
1. Esp-8266:

The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi microcontroller, with built-in TCP/IP networking software, and
microcontroller capability, produced by Espressif Systems in Shanghai, China. The most important aspect
of this device is its Wi-Fi capabilities, which makes it a popular choice among the IOT development
teams. It also provides a reliable source for protype development as it is cheap and accessible almost
anywhere in the world.

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 2. DHT-11:

The DHT11 is a Temperature and humidity sensor that comes with a dedicated NTC to measure
temperature and an 8-bit microcontroller to output the values of temperature and humidity as serial data.
It fetches data and sends it to a microcontroller through a single-wire communication protocol. Here’s the
detailed step-by-step explanation:

• The microcontroller sends a start signal to the DHT-11 by pulling the data line low for at least
18ms.

• This signals the DHT11 to prepare for communication.

• The DHT11 responds by pulling the data line low for 80µs and then high for another 80µs to
acknowledge the start signal.

• The sensor begins to send 40 bits of data:

1. 8 bits for humidity integer part

2. 8 bits for humidity decimal part

3. 8 bits for temperature integer part

4. 8 bits for temperature decimal part

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 5. 8 bits for checksum (for error detection)

• Each bit is sent as a pulse like a high pulse or low pulse:

• The microcontroller reads the data line state during the high signal period to determine if it's a 0 or
a 1.

• The microcontroller checks the checksum byte to ensure the integrity of the received data because
it makes sure if the data is valid or not.

• After all, 40 bits are sent, the DHT11 releases the bus, and the data line goes back to high. High in
this case is Idle state.

Software requirements:
1. Arduino IDE:
The programming of Esp 8266 is done on Arduino IDE; the selection of I/O pins and determination of
its functions are all done on this environment.

2. Firebase:
It creates a bridge between the data representation data storage. The ESP8266 send data to firebase
which is developed by google and a cloud base service.

3. Mobile App:
The app is developed on flutter. Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit by Google for building natively
compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.

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Power Consumption:

The DHT11 sensor has power:

• Active Measurement: Approximately 0.5–2.5 mA.

• Idle State: Negligible current draw.

In the case of Esp8266 the Wi-Fi operations can be power-intensive. It has four modes, but we
have utilized only active mode here as our project is simple and we focus on real time
representation of data.

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 • Active Mode (Wi-Fi ON): Approximately 70–200 mA during data transmission.
• Modem Sleep Mode: Around 15–20 mA; Wi-Fi is disabled, but the CPU remains active.
• Light Sleep Mode: Approximately 0.4–1 mA; both CPU and Wi-Fi are paused, waking
up via interrupts.
• Deep Sleep Mode: Roughly 20–150 µA; the CPU and Wi-Fi are off, waking up via the
RTC timer.

So, if we add up these powers, we get 2.5mA + 100mA (average) = 102.5mA when it is doing
real time transmission of data.

Implementation and methodology:

1. Data Acquisition:
o The DHT-11 sensor measures temperature and humidity.

o We fetch the data in digital form and sent to the ESP8266 for processing.

2. Data Processing:
o The ESP8266 reads the sensor data and formats it for transmission.

o Error is handled and data validation are performed to ensure reliability.

3. Wireless Transmission:
o The ESP8266 connects to a Wi-Fi network and sends the data to Firebase.

o HTTP requests are made to update the database in real-time.

o The authentication key which is called firebase authentication key is used as a unique
identifier for your database and the data collected by the esp-8266 is stored in this
database.

4. Cloud Storage:
o The Data is stored in a structured “JSON” format on Firebase.

o It Allows for scalable and real-time access from any internet-enabled device.

5. Data Visualization:
o Data can be visualized through a Flutter-based mobile application for real-time
monitoring. The pictures are shown above

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Future Improvements:
• From the Aspect of the future developments there are two possibilities either we can use more
sensors for detecting the wind and soil moisture or something like that in this way our weather
monitoring system will be expanded, these sensors can include:
1. BMP180/BMP280 – Barometric Pressure and Altitude Sensor.
2. BH1750 – Light Intensity Sensor
3. MQ-135 – Air Quality Sensor
4. Rain Sensor (YL-83 or FC-37)
5. UV Sensor (GUVA-S12SD)
6. Soil moisture sensor.

• But if we have to work on the same system like using the temperature and humidity sensors and
Esp8266 or any other microcontroller, we have to take the alternatives of DHT-11 sensor and if
we are using one sensor we can use additional sensors for reliability and if one sensor is defaulted
we can still measure our required data.
• We can use AI to generate smart alarm system and anomaly detection systems by using this data
an training a model on it.

Conclusion
As you can see the IoT-based Weather Monitoring System has been successfully implemented in real-
time environmental monitoring with efficient data acquisition and remote accessibility. It is a low cost
simple and reliable solution.

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