It seems that DIY weather stations can be found all over the place however, even though they have the ability to fulfill the basics that include measuring temperature, humidity and air pressure most aren’t able to discern wind speed and direction. To remedy this, Austin Allen from Elation Sports Technologies LLC has developed his own system, which utilizes an anemometer as well as a weathervane to gauge wind speed.
The sensors for wind direction and the speed sensor were attached onto segments of EMT conduit using 3D-printed mountings. The speed sensor makes use of the internal photo interrupters that are blockaded by tiny plastic tabs every time the disc rotates. In order to read the signal, the Arduino Nano can map the value to the speed. The direction sensor is one Hall effect sensor, which is coupled with a polarized magnetic to determine the direction of the magnetic field created.
Once every 0.8 seconds, the Arduino takes a reading from the two wind sensors and sends that data over USB to a host PC where a Python script collects and writes it to a CSV file. This newly-gathered information can then be converted into actual speed and directional values, which can be plotted with the help of a graphing utility.
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