The smart rain meter

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This is a direct fit for the rain meter sold on AliExpress here to enable sending wireless rain data from the garden directly to Aeonlabs Home automation smart devices.

This smart device add-on can be powered by any 4-6V solar cell not requiring any cabling for installation. It can also be used for data acquisition in a laboratory experiment. To know more go to the section "laboratory Automation".

Functionalities available:

• Live Measurements of Falling Rain
• Live Measurements of Temperature
• Live Measurements of Humidity
• Motion Detection
• Solar & Battery Powered. No wiring is needed.

Citizen Weather Observer Program

The Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) is part of the USA's National Oceanic and atmospheric Administration (NOAA) composed of a network of privately owned electronic weather stations concentrated in the United States and also in over 150 countries. The CWOP was originally set up by amateur radio operators experimenting with packet radio, but now contains a majority of Internet-only connected stations, with more than 10,000 stations worldwide reporting regularly to the CWOP network (July 2015). This network allows volunteers with computerized weather stations to send automated surface weather observations to the National Weather Service in the USA. This data is then used by the Rapid Refresh forecast model to produce short-term forecasts (3 to 12 hours into the future) of conditions across the United States' lower 48 states or in any other country. CWOP Observations are also re-distributed to the public. Before being used, there's an extensive set of quality control verifications, assigns a data quality rating, and makes suggestions before is considered for modeling and forecasting the weather.

How to connect to the CWOP Network

First one needs to sign up at https://madis.ncep.noaa.gov/madis_cwop.shtml and when the token ID arrives it needs to be added to the firmware code.

An easy way to submit weather reports to the NOAA Citizen's Weather Observer Program is by using the cwop.rest API or the Ambient Weather API. For those looking into a vanilla C++ code implementation, one can find it on GitHub on this repository and on Costin Stroie's repository: https://github.com/cstroie/WxUno. To test if your hardware setup if is sending APRS packets and to ensure that everything is working properly one can look at a site like https://aprs.fi/ to see if it was received by the terrestrial network.

#openInnovation#DIY

one final note about the sponsor

Seeed Studio Fusion partially sponsored this project with their PCBA Service, which offers comprehensive PCB manufacturing, prototype PCB assembly, and more. Their services cover everything from PCB fabrication, parts sourcing, and assembly, to testing. Seeed Co-create Program can assist you in bringing your product to market with expert guidance and business networking.

one final note about the author
The PCB Design Files I provide on GitHub for anyone to use is free. If you like this Smart Device or use it, please consider buying me a cup of coffee, a slice of pizza, or a book to help me study, eat, and think to work on new PCB design files.

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