I decided to make my own weather station because of problems with a cheap commercial system. In particular, the wireless receiver frequently lost contact with the sensors and the housing for the temperature sensor introduced errors of several degrees under some conditions. Searching the internet for designs led to several based around Microchip PIC microcontrollers. PIC programming proved quite challenging, so I was pleased to discover the PICAXE project which simplified the process. Around that time, my interest in data loggers (see Cave Pearl) led to me experimenting with an Arduino microcontroller which was even easier to work with. That, in turn, led me to discover the WeatherDuino Project in 2016.

WeatherDuino is a modular professional grade environmental monitoring system based around Arduino microcontrollers. The initial system was designed to measure common weather variables, but that has since been extended to include solar radiation, UV, soil & grass temperature, CO2 and airborne particulates (PM2.5 & PM10). Other advantages include:

The hardware and software are Open Source which makes WeatherDuino an excellent learning tool capable of being adapted to many different requirements. The system is modular, such that up to four transmitters may be used with a single receiver. Each transmitter can have a number of different sensors, making the whole system very flexible in terms of sensor siting. Multiple transmitters also provides a measure of redundancy which is important when the inevitable sensor failures occur. A huge range of sensors are supported, either by the WeatherDuino software or through Arduino libraries. This means you can start with simple low-cost sensors and then upgrade to higher quality ones later.