For a long time, I’ve owned small consumer weather stations to track local weather conditions for my vegetable garden. However, these devices usually fail within two to five years. Commercial-quality stations exist but are often unreasonable for the everyday consumer. Instead of replacing my current failing station, I’ve decided to build my own weather station. My goal is to create something more durable than typical consumer models while keeping costs reasonable. This first version is a prototype; perfection isn’t realistic initially, so testing and iteration will be key.

Weather Parameters

The station will run on an ESP32-based microcontroller and measure:

  • Temperature
  • Humidity
  • Air Pressure
  • Wind Speed
  • Wind Direction
  • Rainfall Amount

Features

Additional features include:

  • A small OLED display for showing weather data or any errors at the station itself
  • A photosensor for detecting nighttime and placing the microcontroller into low-power mode
  • A 14.8V solar-powered battery pack (4x 18650 Li-ion batteries)

The microcontroller will transmit data via onboard Wi-Fi to a computer for logging and analysis.

As the project progresses, I’ll share my MicroPython code here.

Code Snippets

# Code snippet coming soon

Update (4/6/2025): It’s Alive!

Weather Station Internals

The “guts” of the weather station are nearly complete. All sensors, except the rain gauge and photosensor, are connected and providing raw output. The wind speed and direction sensors output analog signals ranging from 0-5V, requiring a voltage divider to scale them down to the ESP32’s 3.3V input. Calibration will follow soon. Once the electronics are fully operational, I’ll move on to modeling a case/frame suitable for 3D printing.