It might be time to bring the weather station inside so I can manually control the physical inputs. It's too cold to be outside and it's always fun to sit in the living room madly twisting, spinning, blowing and shaking a large plastic porcupine of sensors while looking at quickly moving, squiggly lines on my phone..
 |
| Weather stations in winter can be a bit unreliable. My "rain gauge" reads zero, but I'm pretty sure there has been some precipitation recently just from looking. I might bring it inside and work on the graphic display of the Bluetooth receiver. |
I'm not looking forward to coding again, at least not this project. It works now, works very well in fact. But from what I remember I wrote some good, tight code - then got excited and went on an experimental streak. So there is probably lots of orphaned threads and poorly conceived routines wrapped around the well written, well documented portion of the program.
However, after a few months of successful testing with a Bluetooth data stream, I realize that I need to use another communication protocol with a longer range (probably LORA) so I can get the weather station into an area where the wind and rain won't be affected by surrounding structures. With Bluetooth I can only get 40-50 feet away from the house. But with LORA I could easily get 250 feet. That's enough to get the sensors out into an unobstructed area.
The station and my DIY display works well enough to give me a reasonable idea of what's going on and a basic record of overnight activity. But I also want to add a few more capabilities and display features.
If I do actually work on the display I'll try to document the process this time. It's actually pretty cool and fun to play with - plus it uses some basic interface techniques I've re-used several times. The real problem with blogging about it is that there is Android code, Arduino code, interface concerns, data storage and translation and .... well you get the picture. There's a lot going on.
But maybe if I write about each part as it happens I won't get bogged down in trying to create one huge, master tutorial. At the very least, I'll post some pics of the interface.
