Raspberry Pi and Arduino Uno Working together as a Basic Meteorological Station

📝 Abstract

The present paper describes a novel Raspberry Pi and Arduino UNO architecture used as a meteorological station. One of the advantages of the proposed architecture is the huge quantity of sensors developed for its usage; practically one can find them for any application, and weather sensing is not an exception. The principle followed is to configure Raspberry as a collector for measures obtained from Arduino, transmitting occurs via USB; meanwhile, Raspberry broadcasts them via a web page. For such activity is possible thanks to Raspbian, a Linux-based operating system. It has a lot of libraries and resources available, among them Apache Web Server, that gives the possibility to host a web-page. On it, the user can observe temperature, humidity, solar radiance, and wind speed and direction. Information on the web-page is refreshed each five minute; however, measurements arrive at Raspberry every ten seconds. This low refreshment rate was determined because weather variables normally do not abruptly change. As an additional feature, system stores all information on the log file, this gives the possibility for future analysis and processing.

💡 Analysis

The present paper describes a novel Raspberry Pi and Arduino UNO architecture used as a meteorological station. One of the advantages of the proposed architecture is the huge quantity of sensors developed for its usage; practically one can find them for any application, and weather sensing is not an exception. The principle followed is to configure Raspberry as a collector for measures obtained from Arduino, transmitting occurs via USB; meanwhile, Raspberry broadcasts them via a web page. For such activity is possible thanks to Raspbian, a Linux-based operating system. It has a lot of libraries and resources available, among them Apache Web Server, that gives the possibility to host a web-page. On it, the user can observe temperature, humidity, solar radiance, and wind speed and direction. Information on the web-page is refreshed each five minute; however, measurements arrive at Raspberry every ten seconds. This low refreshment rate was determined because weather variables normally do not abruptly change. As an additional feature, system stores all information on the log file, this gives the possibility for future analysis and processing.

📄 Content

International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology (IJCSIT) Vol 9, No 5, October 2017 DOI:10.5121/ijcsit.2017.9508 97

RASPBERRY PI AND ARDUINO UNO WORKING TOGETHER AS A BASIC METEOROLOGICAL STATION

José Rafael Cortés León1 and Ricardo Francisco Martínez-González2, Anilú Miranda Medinay3 and Luis Alberto Peralta-Pelaez3

1Department of Electric-Electronic Engineering, Instituto Tecnologico de Veracruz (TecNM), Veracruz, Mexico 2Department of Electric-Electronic Engineering, Instituto Tecnologico de Veracruz (TecNM), Veracruz, Mexico 3Department of Chemistry-Biochemistry Engineering, Instituto Tecnologico de Veracruz (TecNM), Veracruz, Mexico

ABSTRACT

The present paper describes a novel Raspberry Pi and Arduino UNO architecture used as a meteorological station. One of the advantages of the proposed architecture is the huge quantity of sensors developed for its usage; practically one can find them for any application, and weather sensing is not an exception. The principle followed is to configure Raspberry as a collector for measures obtained from Arduino, transmitting occurs via USB; meanwhile, Raspberry broadcasts them via a web page. For such activity is possible thanks to Raspbian, a Linux-based operating system. It has a lot of libraries and resources available, among them Apache Web Server, that gives the possibility to host a web-page. On it, the user can observe temperature, humidity, solar radiance, and wind speed and direction. Information on the web-page is refreshed each five minute; however, measurements arrive at Raspberry every ten seconds. This low refreshment rate was determined because weather variables normally do not abruptly change. As an additional feature, system stores all information on the log file, this gives the possibility for future analysis and processing.

KEYWORDS

Raspberry Pi, Arduino UNO, Meteorological station, Novel architecture.

I. INTRODUCTION

In Instituto Tecnologico de Veracruz, some professors have put their efforts together to produce energy by cleaner ways than fossil fuel combustion. Most common options are solar panels and wind turbines [1], both options have a strong dependency of weather emplacement conditions. The current project arises as a need to determine parameters during local studies for renewable energy production. And to give it solution, an embedded system was developed.

An embedded system is a computational system dedicated for a specific purpose [2][3][4]. Customers usually are in touch with them and do not notice them; almost every “smart” is a regular product with an embedded system, which possibilities internet connection, memory, interoperability or simply upgrades human interaction [5][6].

Often in order to reduce costs or energy consumption, embedded system hardware are specifically designed [7]; despite its design, they are often based on a microcontroller (µC) or microprocessor International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology (IJCSIT) Vol 9, No 5, October 2017 98 (µP). Where a µC is a single chip with µP, memory and peripherals included [8]; so, in one way or another, a microprocessor is always part of embedded systems.

An interesting fact of embedded systems is their variety, some of them just execute simple instructions; meanwhile, others support operating system (OS). No matter which hardware a developer uses, it usually can be programmed using C language or any other high-level language, allowing developers to select correct hardware and to get focus on system clocks as it.

There is an extended quantity of available hardware embedded systems for developers; on the current project, two were chosen: Raspberry Pi and Arduino UNO.

1.1 RASPBERRY PI

Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, at the United Kingdom, developed Raspberry Pi. It was created for promoting computer science teachings into elementary school students [9]. The Raspberry Pi is based on a Broadcom system-on-chip device; which had a 700 MHz processor, a graphics processor unit and 512 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) [10].

Nowadays, there are various models of Raspberry Pi but project works on model B. It has eight general-purpose input/outputs, two USB ports, a high definition media interface (HDMI) output, and other non-relevant features for this project. Additionally, Raspberry Pi needs an operating system which is stored on a secure digital (SD) card. Operating system selection was not easy, because of the good quantity of them; the more relevant one are Raspbian, Pidora, and RISC OS. Raspbian was selected for current project for the wide diversity of tutorials and info available online. Raspbian is a free-license Linux operating system based on Debian and optimized for its usage with Raspberry Pi hardware [11].

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.