Interesting Sensors To Add To Your Weather Station Project

A Weather station project is a project that gives you information about the weather in a particular area and is quite useful for a lot of things like planning of the day, farming and several others. A weather station project is one of those projects where you can have different types of sensors attached to it. In this post, I will highlight some interesting sensors that can be added to a weather station based project.

DS18B20

The DS18B20 is a temperature sensor and one of my favorite one. Unlike other temperature sensors, the DS18B20 is one wire type of sensor. It only requires one wire for communication and also supports parasite modes. Parasite mode means it doesn’t need a power supply, and it can get powered from the same data line. One of the features of the DS18B20 and other one-wire sensors is the fact that you connect multiple sensors to just one pin. I have connected about 32 of those sensors to one single digital pin on the Arduino Uno.

DHT22

The DHT22 is quite a popular sensor among makers. It is a digital sensor that allows one to measure the temperature and humidity of the environment. Unlike the DS18B20, this one can give you both temperature and humidity. It is very handy for saving budget and resources.

Rain Drop Detector

This is great for detecting the presence of rainfall or even small water droplets. The sensors give both an analog and digital output which can be feed to your data acquisition device. The detection of rain can be used to take actions for other applications.

UV Sensor

The UV sensor fully called Ultraviolet light sensor is a sensor that can measure the UV index which can be useful for some applications. With this sensor, you can get interesting data regarding the amount of UV in the environment.

Light Intensity Sensor

This should be one of the most important sensors in your weather station project. The sensor is used for measuring the light intensity of the environment and shouldn’t be confused with UV sensor.

Moisture Soil Sensor

This does basically what the name implies – Measurement of the moisture level in the soil. Excellent addition to your weather project.

BMP280

This sensor gives you temperature and barometric pressure. The sensor is great for all sorts of weather sensing and can even be used in both I2C and SPI!

BME280

This sensor gives you the temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity! A perfect 3 in 1 environmental sensor and should find applications in several environmental projects. Supports both I2C and SPI.

BME680

It is basically a BME280 plus VOC gas sensing capabilities all in a very compact size. Very good if you need gas concentration details. It can be used to detect gasses & alcohols such as Ethanol, Alcohol and Carbon Monoxide, and perform air quality measurements, but it cannot differentiate gasses or alcohols, it only gives one VOC value.

Lighting Strike Storm

This sensor can measure the distance of lighting strike storm from 1 km up to 40 km away and supports SPI and I2C. Can be found here.

In as much these highlighted sensors are meant to be used for a weather station project, they can also find applications in other projects.

That will be all for now, do you know any other exciting sensors? Kindly, share below.

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