Maker Life: Weather station
With Maker Life’s latest kit, Alex Cox discovers the perfect way to express how depressing the British weather can be with just a little Python code.
Alex Cox expresses how incredibly depressing the British weather can be.
Time for a sequel review, of sorts. Last issue [ LXF237] we dissected Maker Life’s Pi Zero starter kit – a neat introduction to playing with Raspberry Pi GPIO, but one that doesn’t offer a huge amount of long-term challenge.
Here’s its polar opposite: a kit that incorporates a little electrical engineering, a whole lot of code, and offers something practical. You’re not just lighting lights or pressing buttons, you’re creating a weather station. And while it’s a step away in terms of electronics – the fiddly breadboard of the basic kit is replaced by a straight-up wiring junction box – the Maker Life Weather Station is a much more rewarding experience than its low-end sibling.
What do you get for your money?
It’s a big box, containing some big stuff. The highlights (aside from the Pi Zero W, pre-Noobsed 16GB SD card, and waterproof enclosure) are the sensors. There’s an anemometer (that’s a wind speed monitor), a rain gauge and a temperature sensor. The first two items are just offthe-shelf components, pre-wired with RJ11 connectors for whatever system they were initially intended to connect to. To use them with the Pi you’ll need to chop off the connectors and wire them in yourself.
There’s no soldering required thanks to the aforementioned junction box, and Maker Life has been thoughtful enough to include a USB extension cable (and a proper Pi power supply) in order to supply the relevant juice to the setup when it’s out in your garden. There’s also a short pole on which to mount the anemometer.
The instructions are much improved from those of the most basic kit. The wiring diagrams are clear, and the wording won’t make you an electrical engineer overnight, but it’s enlightening. If anything there’s a little less to do; the basic kit offers three individual projects, while this is just one package. That’s not such a bad thing, though, because this is a practical object you can use.
Once the weather station is all wired up and the initial software steps are taken care of, you can download the entire code base at once to prove that it’s working, or type it in yourself to get a better feel for what’s happening. Whichever you choose, there’s a full code breakdown in the manual that explains what each section does and why.
Again, like its junior sibling, Maker Life’s Weather Station offers no suggestion as to where to take the code next. Connecting to the Pi Zero W via SSH (and once it’s locked away in its weatherproof box, that’s about your only option) is a fine way to see a scrolling status of each of the sensors, but recording data, for example, or sending data to a collaborative service like WeatherUnderground ( www.wunderground.com) aren’t included.
These are things you’ll want to do, but you’ll need to provide your own manual to code these features yourself, which could add a pretty extensive amount of longevity to the kit. As you expand the code, and maybe even add in additional sensors of your own, you’ll expand your programming knowledge, and even if you don’t you’ll at least known how fast the wind’s blowing.