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Weather Stations using MangoES
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I thought I would share a recent little side-project that I did, putting together a neat and tidy solution to take wind measurements over a three month period for a customer who is interested in installing small wind turbines at some of their rural radio repeater sites.
We built two almost-identical boxes for the customer, using a MangoES to log data from a Davis Instruments "Vantage Pro 2" weather station. All the equipment in the box is powered by an external DC supply (one site has 48VDC, one has 12VDC) provided by the customer.
The MangoES logs and records data from the weather station at a 30s interval. The data is then pushed to our Mango server using the Persistent TCP Mango module and a 3G VPN router (the bare PCB in the images below) provides connectivity via a Yagi antenna high on a mast.
An 'Ocean Controls' modbus gateway is used to connect the MangoES unit to the weather station using the built-in RS485 interface.
The MangoES is then connected, using ethernet, to our 3G router - which not only allows it to transmit data, but also allows us to log in (via our VPN) and check up on the units or make adjustments anytime.
The metal brackets are for mounting the weather station console/keypad on (which is actually required, unfortunately, to take measurements via RS485):
The data that we are getting from the units is very detailed. In total the MangoES is recording about 30 weather measurements, and we are even able to measure the DC supply voltage (as recorded by our 3G router) via the Mango SNMP module.
After the units were installed, I also set up Mango to send a weekly summary report to myself and the customer via email. The report shows the last week's worth of weather data on a chart and includes CSV files. It includes some average, mix and max values too. The email report is particularly convenient as it means the customer automatically receives the data and doesn't have to request it.
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If anyone has any specific questions about this project I'm happy to try to answer them.
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What module are you using to read the Vantage Pro 2 data into Mango?
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Hey Pedro, sorry about the late reply. Using Modbus TCP module to log the data, and Persistent TCP to sync it.
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Nice. I am working on a project for a client for a similar setup but instead of the Vantage Pro 2, we use the Weather Envoy with serial interface which does away with the display altogether and makes it more compact. They wanted a colour display instead of the standard one and to add additional features such as the ability to send SMS or to send to a server. It's programmed with .NET Microframework and runs on custom built hardware with 7" LCD with capacitive touch. The following image shows the initial work on the unit. The other image shows the final release with all the graphics for weather forecast etc.
We plan to send the data to Mango and I have done some testing with the free version for the time being.
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This is really nice. Wow! what a great job you guys did...
