You are on page 1of 4

19th Telecommunications forum TELFOR 2011 Serbia, Belgrade, November 22-24, 2011.

978-1-4577-1500-6/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE




Abstract Weather monitoring is of great importance in
many domains such as: agriculture, military, entertainment
etc. There are several solutions for monitoring the weather.
The classical solution consists in static weather stations.
Another solution is based on wireless sensor networks
(WSNs). The third solution uses low dimensions weather
stations. This paper presents a weather station made of
temperature, humidity, pressure and luminosity sensors
embedded in a microcontroller based board. The station is
controlled through the SMS service of mobile phones.
Keywords microcontroller, sensor, SMS, weather
monitoring.
I. INTRODUCTION
HEATHER monitoring is of great importance in
many domains. It offers information about
temperature, pressure, humidity, luminosity, wind speed
and direction which are useful in applications from
different domains such as: agriculture, military,
entertainment etc.
There are several solutions for monitoring the weather.
The classical solution consists in static weather stations.
They collect data and send them by wires to a central
station. The solution requires specific buildings for the
weather stations and the resolution of the monitoring is
low since the number of such stations is relatively low
because of financial reasons.
Another solution is based on wireless sensor networks.
Wireless sensors are dropped or placed in the desired area
and they collect and send wirelessly the weather
information. Data can be sent by each sensor or can be
collected locally and sent by a unique device. The solution
offers high resolution (it depends on the density of the
sensors) but has the classical disadvantages of wireless
sensor networks: limited lifetime, lower accuracy, low
robustness etc.
The third uses low dimensions weather stations. They
can be static or mobile. The sensors are implemented in
boards of a few square inches. They have to be connected
to a CPU and to a communication interface. They can be
linked to a PC, to a laptop or can be embedded in a
microcontroller based board. These small weather stations
can be controlled locally, by a PC or a laptop, or remotely.
Mircea Popa is with Politehnica University, Faculty of Automation
and Computers, Department of Computers, No. 2, Blv. V. Parvan,
300223 Timisoara, Romania (phone: +40 256 403217, e-mail
mircea.popa@ac.upt.ro).
Catalin Iapa is with Politehnica University, Faculty of Automation
and Computers, No. 2, Blv. V. Parvan, 300223 Timisoara, Romania (e-
mail catalin@ligaac.ro).
The remote control can be implemented through wires, on
Internet, or wirelessly by using different communication
technologies.
This paper presents a weather station made of
temperature, humidity, pressure and luminosity sensors
embedded in a microcontroller based board. The station is
controlled through the SMS service of mobile phones.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the next
section presents related work, the third section describes
the proposed solution and the last section outlines the
conclusions.
II. RELATED WORK
Weather monitoring was approached by many authors.
The specific literature describes a consistent work.
Reference [1] shows how data from static sensors can
be collected by using mobile robots (data mules). The
advantage is to save the energy of the sensors by avoiding
wireless communications. Thus, the lifetime of the WSNs
will be prolonged.
Reference [2] proposes a wireless remote weather
monitoring system based on Micro-Electro-Mechanical
Systems (MEMS) and wireless sensor networks. The
sensors for measuring temperature, humidity, pressure,
wind speed and direction are integrated on a single chip.
The sensed information is sent wirelessly to a central PC.
Reference [3] describes another solution for
environment monitoring by WSNs. In order to avoid long
distance communications between the sensors and a
central station, the paper proposes the use of mobile
devices (PDAs, mobile phones, laptops), interconnected in
a MANET, for collecting and centralizing the readings of
the sensors.
In reference [4] a new portable micro weather station is
presented. It consists in a multi-sensor chip, anemometer,
measurement system, display system and power
management system. The multi-sensor chip senses
temperature, relative humidity and pressure.
Reference [5] introduces the idea of Weather Station on
a Chip (WSOC) and describes an implementation of such
a chip. WSOC is made by sensors, a microcontroller,
interface circuits and ASIC for power management.
In reference [6] it is shown how wireless sensor
networks can be used in environmental, including weather,
monitoring. A comprehensive review of the available
solutions to support environmental monitoring
applications is presented.
Embedded Weather Station with Remote
Wireless Control
Mircea Popa, Member IEEE, and Catalin Iapa
W
297
III. THE PROPOSED SOLUTION
A. General Presentation
The weather station consists in a weather board which
contains temperature, humidity, pressure and luminosity
sensors, embedded in a microcontroller based board. The
station is remotely controlled by the user through SMS
commands. The block diagram is presented in fig. 1.
Fig. 1. The block diagram of the weather station
B. The Hardware
The system uses the SEN-08311 USB Weather Board,
[7], which includes the SHT15 temperature and humidity
sensor, the SCP1000 pressure sensor and the TEMT6000
luminosity sensor. The SHT15 sensor offers the value for
the temperature with a precision of +/- 0.3
0
C, the SCP1000
offers the value for the pressure with a precision of +/- 150
Pascal and the TEMT6000 sensor offers values between 1
and 1023 the high values indicating dark levels. The board
collects the data once/second and transmits it through USB
or wirelessly as a string of characters made of the values
for the humidity, the temperature, the pressure, the
luminosity, the level of the battery (0 if the USB
connection is used) and the registration number which is
incremented at each transmission. The SEN-08311 USB
Weather Board is presented in fig. 2.
Fig. 2. The SEN-08311 USB Weather Board
The user accesses the station through the SMS service.
For that, the board has the GSM Telit GM862-GPS
module. It is connected serially to the CPU.
The CPU is based on the ATmega 328 microcontroller.
It is an 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller. Its internal
memory is made of 32KB flash memory with read-while-
write capabilities, 1KB EEPROM and 2KB SRAM. Other
features are: 23 general purpose I/O lines, 32 general
purpose working registers, three flexible timer/counters
with compare modes, interrupt system with internal and
external interrupts, two serial interfaces: USART and SPI,
6-channel 10-bit A/D converter, programmable watchdog
timer with internal oscillator, and five software selectable
power saving modes. The power supply may have values
between 1.8 and 5.5 volts.
C. The Software
The software is written in the Python language. It is
divided in three parts:
- the main program for initializations, establishing
the connection to the GSM network, receiving the
data from the WSB Weather Board and processing
the sensed values so that the user commands can be
achieved;
- the SIM library: the functions set the PIN value,
prepares the SIM card, verifies the strength of the
signal for using the GSM network;
- the SMS library: the functions are responsible with
sending, receiving and erasing, after being
processed, the messages;
Fig. 3 presents the diagram of the software. At start,
initializations are performed: the status led, the SIM card
and the time is updated. Several variables are declared and
initialized. They will memorize the current status of the
weather, the minimum and maximum values, the time
associated with the measurements and the average value of
the weather parameters.
298
After the start, the program enters an infinite loop for
the real-time operation. After entering the loop, the
connection with the USB Weather Board is established
and the string of characters, representing the sensed
values, is read at the rate of one read/second. The string is
separated in values for each parameter and is memorized
in the corresponding variables. The code doing this
operation is presented below:
weatherboard = SER.receive(20)
variable = weatherboard.split(,)
humidity = int (variable[0])
temp = int (variable[2])
pressure = int ((int (variable[4]) *
760)/101325)
luminosity = int(variable[5])
Fig. 2. The software diagram
The current memorized values for temperature,
humidity, pressure and luminosity are compared with the
maximum and minimum values during the day. If the
current values exceed a limit, this is updated and the time
when it was read is also memorized. The average value is
updated too.
299
Next, the occurrence of a special situation is checked. If
this service is set the weather station sends automatically a
message to the user in the following situations: the
temperature exceeds 30
0
C, falls below 0
0
C or the 22 hour
is reached when a report containing the weather values for
the whole day is sent. Between two readings from the
weather board, the program verifies if a command was
launched by the user.
The data received from the sensor board is structured in
an ASCII string with the following format:
#HH.HH,FFF.FF,CCC.CC,TTT.TT,PPPPPP,LLL,B,IIIIII$
and having the following signification:
HH.HH Humidity from the SHT15 sensor
FFF.FF Temperature, in Farenheit degrees, from
the SHT15 sensor
CCC.CC Temperature, in Celsius degrees, from
the SCP1000 sensor
TTT.TT Temperature, in Farenheit degrees, from
the SCP1000 sensor
PPPPPP Pressure from the SCP1000 sensor
LLL Luminosity level from the TEMT6000
sensor
B Battery level; if the power supply is
given by the USB port, B=0
IIIIII Index value
D. Users Commands
The user can receive the following information:
- current weather status;
- weather status in the last 24 hours;
- current temperature and its status in the last 24
hours;
- current humidity and its status in the last 24 hours;
- current pressure and its status in the last 24 hours;
- current luminosity and its status in the last 24
hours;
- list of commands;
- description of commands.
Fig. 4 shows the execution of a command. The
command offers the maximum and minimum values for
the temperature, pressure and humidity collected over the
whole day.
Fig. 4. The execution of the Weather 24h command
IV. CONCLUSIONS
The paper has presented a weather station consisting in
temperature, humidity, pressure and luminosity sensors, a
microcontroller and a GSM module. The station can be
controlled through a mobile phone with SMS service.
Future development directions are:
- adding other sensors, such as sensors for wind
direction and speed and sensors for precipitations;
- adding a friendlier user interface; the present solution
is based on text only;
- connecting the weather station to Internet so that the
information is present real-time and can be consulted
through a PC or a mobile phone with the GPRS service.
REFERENCES
[1] O. Tekdas, J.H. Lim, A. Terzis, and V. Isler, Using Mobile Robots
to Harvest Data from Sensor Fields, IEEE Wireless
Communications, vol. 16, Issue 1, 2009, pp. 30-37
[2] R.H. Ma, Y.H. Wang, and C.Y. Lee, Wireless Remote Weather
Monitoring System Based on MEMS Technologies, Sensors, 2011
[3] A. Vasiliou and A.A. Economides, MANETs for environmental
monitoring, in Proc. of ITS2006 International
Telecommunications Symposium, Fortaleza, Brasil, 3-6 September
[4] Z. Fang et al., A new portable micro weather station, in Proc. of
5
th
IEEE International Conference on Nano/Micro Engineered and
Molecular Systems (NEMS), 20-23 January 2010, pp. 379 382
[5] Q.A. Huang, et al.., Weather Station on a Chip, in Proc. of IEEE
Sensors, 22-24 Oct. 2003, Toronto, Canada
[6] L. M. Oliveira, and J.J. Rodrigues, Wireless Sensor Networks: a
Survey on Environmental Monitoring, Journal of
Communications, vol. 6, no. 2, April 2011, pp. 143-151
[7] www.sparkfun.com
300

You might also like