Raspberry Pi Based Weather Station

Raspberry Pi Weather Station: Monitoring Humidity, Temperature and Pressure over Internet

Humidity, Temperature and Pressure are three basic parameters to build any Weather Station and to measure environmental conditions. We have previously built a mini Weather Station using Arduino and this time we are extending the weather station with Raspberry Pi. This IoT based Project aims to show the current Humidity, Temperature and Pressure parameters on the LCD as well on the Internet server using Raspberry Pi, which makes it a Raspberry Pi Weather Station. You can install this setup anywhere and can monitor the weather conditions of that place from anywhere in the world over the internet, it will not only show the current data but can also show the past values in the form of Graphs.
We have used DHT11 Humidity & temperature sensor for sensing the temperature and BM180 Pressure sensor module for measuring barometric pressure. This Celsius scale Thermometer and percentage scale Humidity meter displays the ambient temperature and humidity through a LCD display and barometric pressure is displayed in millibar or hPa (hectopascal). All this data is sent to ThingSpeak server for live monitoring from anywhere in the world over internet. Do check the Demonstration Video and Python Program, given at the end of this tutorial.

Working and ThingSpeak Setup

This IoT based project has four sections. Firstly DHT11 sensor senses the Humidity & Temperature Data and BM180 sensor measures the atmospheric pressure. Secondly Raspberry Pi reads the DHT11 sensor module’s output by using single wire protocol and BM180 pressure sensor’s output by using I2C protocol and extracts both sensors values into a suitable number in percentage (humidity), Celsius scale (temperature), hectoPascal or millibar (pressure). Thirdly, these values are sent to ThingSpeak server by using inbuilt Wi-Fi of Raspberry Pi 3. And finally ThingSpeak analyses the data and shows it in a Graph form. A LCD is also used to display these values locally.
ThingSpeak provides very good tool for IoT based projects. By using ThingSpeak website, we can monitor our data and control our system over the Internet, using the Channels and webpages provided by ThingSpeak. ThingSpeak ‘Collects’ the data from the sensors, ‘Analyze and Visualize’ the data and ‘Acts’ by triggering a reaction. We have previously explained about sending data to ThingSpeak in detail, you can check there. Here we are briefly explaining to use ThingSpeak for this Raspberry Pi Weather station.