Part 3 - The end of DIY weather stations

A Weather Station Postmortem 

In Part 1 I built a weather shield out of bowls and Part 2 filled it with all sorts of gadgets, powered it using a battery and a charged the battery using a solar panel. The station was remotely deployed in the back yard to avoid interference from blacktop and other structures. 

Deployed

Deployed in 2017 the DIY weather station was solid for several years. It ran and logged data without any intervention. The battery never died and the solar charging worked flawlessly. The logging via the MQTT server and the integration into home assistant was fairly easy and provided years of data (that I have since lost while upgrading Home Assistant). 

Issues

After 3 years things started to get glitchy, I would have to restart the Arduino by taking it apart and disconnecting the battery and solar connector. This would work and it would run for a few more weeks. Not sure if this was related to the solar panel which after a few years I had to start cleaning to remove the film left over the years. 

Another issue was that the bowls used where very thin and cheap and have become very brittle; one stray baseball or soccer kick and you ended up looking like this. 

End Result

It was a great project and lasted much longer given the less than great weather proofing I provided. In retrospect I should have used some higher quality bowls combined with some good silicone to plug the holes. I also would have added a power switch to the outside of the case and hooked up a small USB cable and left it in place to allow debugging without completely disassembling the unit.

Overall, for a first project of this scale, I think it was a great learning experience.