For a while I’ve been meaning to write up the details of the Raspberry Pi weather station that I have built with my eldest daughter. This project builds on a number of examples I’ve seen across the internet, particularly sensing the weather. This details how our system is put together.

Temperature monitoring

We took two temperature sensors and mounted them in a garden post with one pushed down to the bottom for soil temperature and one in the cap for the air temperature. The one-wire sensors can share the same three wires, so are both connected to a wire leading back to the Raspberry Pi through a hole drilled into the side of the post. For waterproofing we surrounded the whole with hot glue. The post is situated in a shady spot and pushed about 30 centimeters deep in the soil.

Wind speed

You can see my graphs of the data, and the code is on github.

When we set up our office earlier in the year I decided on a standing desk which I put together using the Ikea Algot system.
In order to avoid using up desk space with a light I originally planned on a clip on light but then saw my Pi Zero and Unicorn pHat and thought they could make a good alternative.

Hardware

The Raspberry Pi Zero is in a simple case, mounted onto the underside of the shelf above my working space. Attached is it’s power cable, a PiHut wireless adapter connected via USB and of course the Unicorn pHat. The power cable is routed down the side of the shelf to my PowerCube, which will eventually be mounted under my work surface but it’s sticky pad wasn’t strong enough to hold it on the underside of the desk!

Software

As I’ve not yet added any switch for my light, it all has to be controllable remotely, so I set up an API to set the colour of the light which I initially controlled via a web browser with urls like:

http://192.168.0.15:8009/colour/<red>/<green>/<blue>

As you can imagine that got a bit tedious - especially to turn off after I’d shut down my laptop! The next step was to add a simpler way to control the light through my phone so I set up iControl Web with buttons to adjust the light settings. Then when I saw the Home app on iOS 10, I researched ways to get my custom light controllable through that and came across Homebridge which I could point to my API via it’s Better HTTP RGB plugin, a bit of config and a couple of changes to my API.

All the code for my API is on github and is very much a work in progress!

Using my Raspberry Pi, Piglow and the traffic API feeds I have created a script to give me a visual representation of the journey time to work. This gives me an idea of the traffic before I leave the house in the morning, or so that when I’m working at home I can look at it and see how glad I am that I’m not sitting in traffic on the way to work :)

https://github.com/rickymoorhouse/trafficpi