Development of a low cost weather station using free hardware and software

Abstract

Weather stations are a valuable tool to many different areas, like agriculture, aviation, construction, sports and recreation, specially because they collect weather data, which can be stored and processed to gather specific information to correlate events to the weather action. This work shows a development model of a low cost weather station, using only free hardware and software, connected to the internet, giving real time data taken from the station, as well as history of the stored data. This station, even though using low cost or handcrafted sensors, like those that measure wind speed, wind direction and rainfall index, showed consistent results costing only 10% of the price, in comparison with some professional weather stations, allowing its popularization in agriculture, homes and institutions.