Wireless Portable Microcontroller based Weather Monitoring Station

Weather monitoring and its forecasting has become vital part of day-to-day life because of its numerous applications in agriculture, farming, fishery, shipping and military operations. Measuring the weather using conventional or manually operated Weather Monitoring Stations requires skilled labor for operation and demands regular maintenance which invariably increases the life cycle cost of the Weather Monitoring Station. To address these issues, the authors of this paper have attempted to design and implement inexpensive Wireless Portable Weather Monitoring Station using PIC16F887 microcontroller. The implemented Weather Monitoring Station is equipped with sensors to measure weather variables such as relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, rainfall, solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction, surface and ambient temperature. Besides of these capabilities, the designed Weather Monitoring station also includes some unique features like Modbus communication protocol, which provides seamlessly communication of real time weather measurements to the base station (PC\Laptop) over both wired (RS serial) and wireless (Xbee Pro modules) interfaces. Further, at the base station, the received data is logged and uploaded to an online data server to enable worldwide ubiquitous access to the weather measurements. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.