Simple weather station on Arduino

To refresh some basic knowledge about electronics and Arduino platform we will implement a weather station.

Let's define requirements we'll have to out weather station. It should:

• Display current temperature and humidity
• Display current time and date
• Set time and date manually using buttons

We will need following components:

• Arduino-compatible microcontroller
• DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor
• Real-time clock module
• Small breadboard
• 2 small push buttons
• 2 1kOhm resistors
• Bunch of wires
• 5V DC power adapter

Arduino without IDE

For my pet project I need to upload sketches to Arduino board connected to RaspPI. As usual I have only SSH access to PI and don't want to install a lot of unnecessary packages. So the only one thing you have to install it arduino-mk package:

 $ sudo apt-get install arduino-mk  

RFID sensor (Funduino RFID-RC522)

Recently I bought a set of Arduino-compatible components including RFID sensor (RC522).

After short search I've found good tutorial telling how to use this sensor, downloaded a library and connected sensor to my Arduino (be careful there is a typo in original blog post):

• MOSI: Pin 11
• MISO: Pin 12
• SCK: Pin 13
• SS: Pin 10
• RST: Pin 5
• GND: Gnd
• VCC: 3V3

Ultrasonic Sensor: first try

After few weeks waiting they finally came to me direct from China: my new Arduino Nano and a couple of ultrasonic sensors.

Price:

• 1 x Ultrasonic Module HC-SR04 Distance Measuring Transducer Sensor - $2.56 / piece
• 1 x Funduino Nano 3.0 controller - $7.89 / piece.

As soon as I have time I decided so do simple experiment.

First of all I connected VCC and GND pins to common rails and then to corresponding pins of ultrasonic sensor. After that I connected Trigger to Pin 3 and Echo to Pin 2 of Arduino board. As in many existing examples I decided to output signal through Piezo Buzzer. I simply connected Pin 4 of Arduino to positive leg of buzzer and the other leg to common ground.