Design and Implementation of a Microcontroller-based Weather Acquisition Device

Abstract

An atmospheric data acquisition device is designed to ease and improve on the current method of acquiring Temperature, Pressure, and Relative Humidity measurement at different altitudes. The proposed work aims to solve the problem of inadequate atmospheric data by monitoring atmospheric weather conditions using sensors while the microcontroller processes the data collected and relays it to the user. This research was carried out at the University of Uyo, between September 2018 and January, 2023. Considering that weather forecasting is of the utmost importance in our current society, the system has been built using a BME280 module for the atmospheric parameters acquisition, an ESP8266 as the microcontroller for Data processing, and a wireless module for processing and transfer of the data from the BME module, a NEO6M GPS module for longitude and latitude, a Li-ion cell to power the components and a TP4056 circuit to recharge the Li-ion cell. A web application Thingspeak.com was incorporated to help the user interact and access the data to enable ease of understanding and real-time logging of the data collected. This work is targeted toward the weather forecasting sector, agricultural sector, and individuals which may wish to gather information about the atmosphere for knowledge consumption. The results show that this device has a good performance for capturing atmospheric parameters for real-time monitoring purposes.