Update
TheWeatherFrog iOS app is now in beta testing!! Reach out to me if you'd like to demo it. I plan on submitting it to the app store/play store before Halloween. The website is also available, with limited functionality.
The goal of the project is to be able to remotely measure rain and wind speed in any random field. Typically, we place rain gauges in various areas, then periodically checks them. My idea was to create a digital rain gauge that I would be able to check on my phone.
The way this happens is that I have programmed an ESP32 microcontroller, using Arudino's IDE, to measure temperature and humidity via a DHT11 sensor (which has now been upgraded to a DS18B20 which is more commerical grade) along with latitude and longitude via GPS. That data is then uploaded into a database at AWS eitehr via WiFi or LTE. Once the data is uploaded, the website pulls the data from the database for each unique sensor.
The purpose of the project was to get more familiar with creating a product and building it from end to end (i.e. from the hardware to the software) In particular, to get familiar with building iOS & Android applications, programming electronics, and all the backend engineering to enable it.
Here is a picture of the station's "brains" minus the wind direction, anemometer and rain gauge instruments - the casing was designed in Fusion 360 to fit the dimensions of the solar panel, then printed on my 3D printer with PLA filament. I plan on switching to PETG filament in the future, which should help it brave the outdoor elements. The next phase is to
For the project, I am using a LILYGO ESP32 microcontroller and a DS18B20 sensor to measure temperature and humidity data, along with weather instruments that can be found here. I am sending the data to Amazon's SQL database (RDS), then using API gateway, in combination with Lambda, to create API endpoints for my app to pull the data from. Additionally, I am using API's from OpenWeatherMap (weather data/forecasts), Google Places (geocoding/autocomplete), MapBox (maps) & RainViewer (radar) in combination with Firebase (user registration/sign in authentication, saving profile details, etc.)