Yet another weatherstation, solar powered with Rasperrby Pi and webcam

[Alex Edwards]

Happy 2020 everyone. Just another weather / webcam project, but hopefully a bit different

Its a solar powered Raspberry Pi Zero WH, together with FineOffset WS2080 weather station, Pi Camera 1.3, 3G MiFi, EPever LS1024B solar controller, 26Ah battery (2nd hand) and 40W solar panel. Components placed in a UV-resistant plastic box to survive nasty NZ sun. Its all on a slighyl remote hill paddock overlooking the Bay of Islands in New Zealand.

You can see the output here: https://horsetrekn.co.nz/paihia-weather-cam-bay-of-islands - WeeWX links at the bottom of the page.

The idea is to take photos of the weather, but also of the nice view and any horses roaming around the hill paddock. The Pi currently uploads a new photo every 5 minutes to our webserver, and some basic JSON weather data as a very minimal WeeWX report.

Once a day it uploads weather and solar power charts, generated using 2 WeeWX daemons. After weeks creating some EPever / EPsolar drivers, I spotted Mattew Wall had done something similar exactly the same time. I've modified that driver for my needs and created a straight forward skin. I'll upload my stuff to Github when its tidied a bit more. I also spent way too long creating other MODBUS 'map' style drivers I may upload too, or modify the driver to use - they were working well :)

The idea of the 40W panel and quite large battery is the Pi should be able to keep running for around 5 days during winter/stormy weather, and overnight too for weather data. The setup could survive for 24hrs or so using a 7Ah battery and smaller panel. I've got the Pi's box stacked on another to get a better view, and using a 2nd hand barrel as a platform which I'll part fill with water for stability.

I wonder about creating a more generic 'solar' project for WeeWX that could handle different solar controller 'drivers'? I also wonder about including a dummy 'solar driver' as an example in WeeWX?

Next steps -
* Raise camera a bit using a 2m camera cable on a pole.

* Consider uploading WeeWX data more frequenty, possibly to another WeeWX process on the webserver which can then create the charts etc.

* Provide an album and timelapse video of recent images. I already do this on the Pi, but not on the website.

Some tips learned along the way :-

* Mozjpeg does a great job at compressing JPEGs more, especially with ms-ssim tuning, key to saving mobile data etc. Other compression techniques took too long for debatable improvement.

* The Pi seemed unreliable reading USB serial data, until I read about using a powered hub. Even though the USB load is quite low, this seems to help stability a lot. The hub is powered from a dual 12V-5V USB loom from the controller, the other USB powering the Pi.

* The Pi Camera 1.3 seems A LOT nicer to use than the v2 - at least the versions I got. Less resolution, but much nicer colours, better exposure and sharper too.

* sshReach.me is a handy way to login to the Pi over 3G.

[Lars]

Looks great! Nice project!

[Thomas Keffer]

Sweet project! Looking forward to hearing more about it.

One of my fondest memories is making landfall at Opua, just down the road, on a passage from Tonga. It was dawn, and those hills were lit a fiery orange-red. Beautiful scene after 6 days at sea!

-tk

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[Alex Edwards]

Thanks Tom - and intrigued you sailed into Opua, yes just down the road (or sea).  

They've recently upgraded Opua Marina and is now the 'best in NZ' - https://www.nzherald.co.nz/marine/news/article.cfm?c_id=61&objectid=12265243

A bit of a surprise yesterday, but the smoke from Australia's fires arrived over Bay of Islands yesterday.  This image was straight off the webcam.

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[Jim Nagle]

I like this project!  I'm attempting to do a similar video concept to support WX observation conditions at an observatory using a upward looking camera with a fisheye lens to shown visibility conditions.  Are the details of your RPi camera setup available?  I'm also trying to create a telescope eyepiece that would stream the video so that the observation viewed on the large 10" refractor telescope could be displayed on a monitor in the observatory or the internet.

[Alex Edwards]

Hi Jim,

Thanks :)  I've not put any details up yet, though currently just using a regular Pi Camera 1.3.  Its easy to take photos using the "raspistill" command, though I wrote something in Python.  In the end should probably just have kept it as a shell script for simplicity.

Lots of fisheye style camera options around too.  I'd like something of a slightly wider angle lense, but with the sharpness and colour of the Pi Camera 1.3.  The Pi Camera 2 is wider, but the results don't look so nice to my eye.

Good luck!

Alex