WeatherPi Gets a New Sensor

It has been really humid here for several weeks in a row. Rain nearly every day. But that doesn't explain the BME280 Temperature/Pressure/Humidity sensor saying we have 100% humidity nearly all the time. So I read up on it, and found several places where it was written that the BME280 was not as precise as the DHT22 (not the DHT11).

So I ordered up a couple of DHT22's and yesterday WeatherPi got a field upgrade. Here are the pics.

The BME280 is a i2c module that lives inside the chimney which lives inside the gray water-tight box that is the visible part of WeatherPi out on the pole. The DHT22 is a 1-wire module, so it has 1 fewer wires than the BME280. I wanted to keep the atmospheric pressure function of the 280, so I needed to put both sensors in the chimney.

I printed out a small 90 degree angle bracket that I could affix to the 280's bracket inside the chimney. I drilled a hole through the chimney mount for the one extra wire, got power from the 280's VCC and GND, and soldered everything down.

I was putting things back together when I heard the thunder in the distance. I'm not a fan of lightening, so I started moving a little faster. I barely had enough time to get the pole up and the tools put away. I ran back into the house in the rain.

Looks like the new sensor is working much better than the old one. WeatherPi is a great weather station. It lives up to it's name: ARRRRpi. A Reliable, Robust, Repairable Raspberry Pi-based weather station.

Most definitely a Thing That Works. See it on Github here.

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