I recently ordered some of the main components for my weather station from Amazon and they finally arrived via Royal Mail. Quicker than expected from China (just over a week), the items cost me £68.07 (about £55 actually because I had a voucher). Which when it’s being shipped from China, as they’re components for a weather station I still consider quite cheap.
The supplier is a company called MISOL Electronics.
The weather components that I received
These are the components I received in the kit that I ordered from the MISOL Electronics supplier for my weather station. It’s a bit hard to gauge the size of these sensor components, so I put my PS4 controller to them for scale, they’re actually a lot smaller than expected. What do you expect for a cheaper price, and because these are hobby grade weather station components you’re not going to get something for your weather station that’s enormous in size anyway. To be fair, size doesn’t really matter if they do their job as expected anyway.
All these components are meant to connect to a base station that operates / transmits on a RF Frequency of 433Mhz. A lot of the manufacturers seems to use similar setups so they’re mostly interchangeable I believe anyway.
This supplier also makes other equipment like a Thermo / Hygro sensor that connects to their setup however I didn’t purchase these. So this is a problem I’ve got to solve anyway so that I can get the setup working with my ESP32/Arduino/Raspberry PI weather station with datalogging built into it. One problem at a time however.
The components up close
This is the rain level gauge received from MISOL Electronics on Amazon. In terms of connection, this weather gauge has an RJ22 connector with 2-wires on it (RJ22 is the same as RJ11 in size, it’s just meant to be for 2-wire, supposedly). There’s also a nify level gauge built into the rain gauge so that you can make sure the rain guage isn’t going to affect the readings when collection water. I think is important for the rain gauge, because a sensor that’s not level could tip internallly easier, and also affect the collection speed of the device, which can affect the readings you receive.
Anyhoo, there’s 2 wire colours on it, these being Red and Green. Manual information online is in Chinese and a bit sketchy, so as a best guess I’d probably say that the Red wire is voltage, and the Green wire is RX. Or possibly Red/Green would be the RX/TX combo, but the Red wire being VCC would make more sense. Someting to power it, and something to receive the signal when the reed switch is tripped as the bucket tips.
In terms of specs it allows the following measurements :
- Accuracy : + / – 10%
- Resolution : 0.3mm (if rain volume < 1000mm)
- Resolution : 1mm (if rain volume > 1000mm)
This should be fine really, as unless I’m expecting a monsoon of water, I’ll be guessing less than 1 metre of water.
This is my wind speed sensor for my home weather station. For information it’s marked up as product code WH2081 if it helps, supposedly it can measure speeds up to 100mph from what I can find online, which is more than enough. Unless I’m expecting a Tornado, then there’s bigger issues
In terms of specs it allows the following measurements :
- Wind speed : 0-160km/h (0~100mph)
- Accuracy: +/- 1m/s (wind speed< 10m/s)
- Accuracy : +/-10% (wind speed > 10m/s)
As a note this wind speed sensor is meant to plug into the wind direction sensor. Rather than a jack directly onto a weather board. I figure this is for a few reasons. One being it simplifies the connections and number of wires, secondly it can link into the wind direction during gust speeds, and allows it to ommunicate between them or do some simple maths for example. Again two wires Red/Green, so best guess VCC and RX. I’ll update this post if it turns out to be different
and lastly My wind direction sensor
This is the final piece of the 3 piece setup that I ordered. Again it’s marked up as WH2081.
It has an RJ11/RJ22 jack underneath it, that is for the input from the wind speed sensor. The output from this sensor has 4 wires to hook up (RED/BLACK/GREEN/YELLOW). These are most likely VCC, GND, RX and TX.
I’ll need to look at how everything works, when setting up these sensors, but it’s nice little challenge. My ESP32 has built in WiFi so it would be nice to see if it’s possibly somehow to transmit the information this way.
One important thing to note with this wind direction sensor, is that the sensor needs alignning with the actual directions of a compass. On the outer plastic, there’s four markings to symbolise North, East, South and West. On mine, the pointer points North. So the N symbol needs to actually face North, S needs to face South etc, before it’s secure to it’s mounting point
This probably isn’t going to affect me for my DIY method of connection, but for the main base station you can buy it’s important that this is align otherwise the wind direction readings will be off. I’ll still do this to my sensor, as it’s one less thing to troubleshoot for me
What next for my weather station
I’m planning on buying some PCB jacks for RJ11 connections so that I can plug all the sensors straight into a board to simplify the connections. I could cheat and use an add-on board of sorts, but I’m in no rush with my DIY Weather Station project so I’m doing small steps at a time, because it’s helping me learn meterology, and new subjects. Plus it’s fun.
I’ll be adding posts on my weather station project as I work on each sensor in turn, as the final project is being uploaded to my website. Either as a dedicated page, or a seperate site entirely focussed on weather. I’m aiming to do this because there’s a few other sensors I want to add to my weather station. Sky Cameras, Air Pollution, Lightning Detection Modules, Solar Radiation modules to name a few.
Want something like this yourself?
If you don’t feel comfortable building your own weather station like I’m doing, you can buy the full professional weather station on Amazon sold by MISOL Electronics and then simply enjoy getting your own local personal weather readings. Good for the impromptu barbeque senssions or sunbathing sessions.
