MICROCONTROLLER BASED WEATHER STATION

 Introduction of Weather Station

This is the introduction of my new project which is related to development of a weather monitoring station based on microcontroller 8051. With the rapid evolution of the embedded system design there is a need of integrated system manufacturing using controllers. Since the microcontroller offers a cheap and viable solution for a complex problem they are used extensively in modern time control applications ranging from plain to multifaceted applications. The most of the weather stations employ microcontroller for an effective measurement and display of different weather parameters such as Temperature, Direction, Humidity, Pressure and Speed of the wind. In this project we will learn to develop a system which will be used to measures three parameters of the weather only at the start and later on other feature and parameters like wind, temperature humidity, rainfall, etc of a complete weather station will be added. So the initial paraments of microcontroller based weather stations will be:

• Temperature
• Direction of Wind
• Speed of Wind

 It employs a Temperature Sensor, Speed Sensor and a sensor for direction of the wind. The information obtained through these devices is processed by microcontroller and then displayed on an LCD screen. This project demanded an intensive and systematic design electrically and mechanically. Since processing of the data required some of the complex mathematical and conversion operations therefore the software was developed in C51 language rather than in Assembly language.

Learning Objectives of Project

The important objectives of this microcontroller project are as under: 

• The Hardware Designing for weather Station using micro-controller 8051 Family 
• Interfacing of various important electronics devices and components to the microcontroller

§  ADC Interface

§  LCD interface

§  EPROM interface

§  Weather station transducers and sensor interfaces

• Calibration of the wind Direction and wind Speed 
• Electro-mechanical interface for the Sensors of Weather station
• learning about the use of Rotary Encoder sensor
• Implementation of LCD Display
• Interface of ADC with micro-controller

List of Key Components used in development of weather Station

1)     AT89C51 (Atmel Microcontroller)

     2)     ADC574A (ADC: Analog To digital Converter)

     3)     LM35 (Temperature Sensor)

     4)     LCD (Liquid Crystal Display)

     5)     EPROM (27C64)(Erasable and Programmable Read Only Memory)

     6)     LATCH (74LS373)(Tri –State Latch)

     7)     Rotary Encoder (HEDS-5540)(Speed Sensor)

     8)     Power Supply (+12V ,-12V,5V)

           9)     Mechanical Assembly for sensors implantation.

    The main focused design idea about this project is to develop a compact, feasible, low-cost integrated weather forecasting station. The methodology employed in the development of this project is slightly different as comparable to the commercial weather forecasting systems regarding the selection of components, here we have selected those components which are easily available in market every where and are low cost because the focus is to design a low cost project for educational purposes, so that students of university can have idea from it and develop their own project for the completion of degree and thesis. The components interfaces will be discussed one by one in separate post in detail , be In contact with this blog. The interfaces of ADC, transducers of weather station, control of LCD, communication with EEPROM etc will be provided in later posts.