Low Cost High Altitude Automatic Weather Station Design

Abstract

When looking at installing a renewable energy generator, you need to be confient of the resource (solar, wind) at your particular location as this affcts the energy generated at the selected site. With solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, this can be done by looking at historic data, generally from satellite readings, for the particular latitude. Ths will yield pretty accurate resource data. However, the wind resource is incredibly variable and depends upon the exact topology of the area. Houses, trees, and valleys all can affct the local wind resource. For this reason, wind speed data is collected at a potential wind turbine installation site. This gives real data which can be used to assess the wind speed. When installing a number of very expensive large wind turbines, one must be very confient about the wind speed data. Th data must be robust and reliable and the developer will be willing to spend a lot of money on accurate industrial equipment to have lots of confience in the data. Ths project intends to overcome this barrier by providing a low-cost, reusable, opensource wind speed recording unit, which can be lef at high altitude in a remote location to record data and help improve the site’s wind speed assessment. We have proposed and developed a low-cost hardware module based on Arduino open source platform, which measures the meteorological data, including air, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and solar radiation, with two options: Th fist is the wireless option at which it sends the measured information to Excel spreadsheet running on a PC through wireless link. The second is the data logger option at which it records the measured data to SD card as Excel fie with date and time every 10 seconds.