What is it?

This is a Weather Station, that publishes air temperature, relative humidity, pressure, illumination and lipo battery voltage over MQTT.

You can connect either a 2.13" ePaper(WaveShare e-ink HAT) or 0.96" OLED display to it. You can put it into a box, hook up a 6V solar panel and put it in your balcony.

And the MQTT messages ? Well, you can add widgets to your smart phone home screen, you can run a simple Python application to gather the statistics...

Or you can get more creative and use this little device for your home automation utilizing MQTT+IFTTT and some WiFi mains power controllers adjusting ACs, Heaters, Irrigators and Lights in your super futuristic garden :)

Why did you make it?

I was really excited when I found out about ESP8266 chip and that it is supported by Arduino! Immediately I started building various devices powered by it - be it a remote car with mouse sensor as a camera, a balancer robot or even a SMD Reflow station.

One of those projects was a weather station, so that I could put these little modules around my city and monitor how the temperature/air pressure/humidity changes over time and space. So I built some prototypes. They worked really well, I was even asked by a biology museum to build some for them to monitor air quality of their expositions (those samples are very sensitive to temperature and humidity).

And then after several more people asked me to build one for them I decided to go and make them professionaly.

What makes it special?

I've seen many boards that are smaller, neater, packed with more features (e.g. a calibrated light sensor). But those were not really finished products - meaning from hardware to software.

So I think that this project stands out because it is a self contained product - from hardware to software and documentation. And moreover it is all Open Source!

Features

• mDNS
• OTA flashing
• Web UI for configuration
• Connect to free wifi or one of configured networks
• MQTT Pub/Sub
• Report temperature
• Report relative humidity
• Report air pressure
• Report battery voltage
• Report light intensity (photoresistor)
• Monitor and display several other station telemetry (ePaper variant)
• Headless
• OLED display
• E-Paper display (Waveshare 2.13" e-ink HAT)
• Configure Wifi networks via MQTT
• Configure station name via MQTT
• Configure station names to be monitored via MQTT
• Persistent telemetry MQTT messages
• Utilizes low quiescent current LDO regulator and deep sleep for low power consumption
• Integrated TP4056 LiPo battery charger
• Python script to log telemetry data
• Customizable firmware based on Arduino Framework
• ePaper variant can last for more than 1 month without charging on a single 600mAh batter
• Conversely OLED variant lasts for about two weeks on a single charge (OLED is constantly lit)
• The board dimensions are 28 x 46.5 x 7.7 mm
• 3D printed case dimensions are 34.7 x 54.6 x 17 mm
• More details on GitHub and my blog...

Knowledge/Skills required

• Familiarity with PlatformIO (My blog contains instructions on how to setup Atom with PlatformIO) *
• Flashing ESP8266 chips *
• Some soldering skills for battery and/or OLED display

.* These are not required, as you can do the configuration using WebUI interface.

WebUI interface

When you power up the board for the first time(given that it was flashed with firmware and SPIFFS) it will enter AP mode with the name e.g. ESPWeather-oled. You may connect to that AP and enter 192.168.4.1 in your browser. After the page loads, you will be able to see current readings of telemetry data.

In the menu you can select Setup and License items(To invoke the menu simply click on ESPWeather title if you are on a mobile device). In the Setup page you will be presented with various settings: Wifi, MQTT, General timeout and deep sleep settings.

After you are done configuring your Weather Station, you can save the config and reboot the device. Next time it will boot into normal operation and the WebUI will not be available.

WebUI and AP mode is activated each time after power up or hard reset(including a soft reset after OTA update) and is active for 5 minutes unless a connection to the web page is made.

What will you get?

Upon ordering you will receive a soldered and flashed Weather Station board. Optionally you can order either an ePaper or OLED display, a 600mAh LiPo battery.

I am not including 3D printed case though(OpenSCAD code is included in the GitHub repo).