Once upon a time…I bought a Tinkerforge Weather Station, wrote some C# code to interact with it, and managed to get it to run via Mono on a Raspberry PI with Linux.
My end goal was to measure temperature etc. in my garden, and somehow show it on this website.
(There are already two old posts about this on my website but not here, because they are from before I started mirroring my posts to here)
Then I put the weather station and the Raspberry PI in a drawer…and completely forgot about them. That was about eleven years ago!
Now I found both items again and decided to continue the project.
But of course, a decade is quite a long time for software - a lot of my original 2013 plan is not relevant anymore today:
The new plan
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I don’t need Mono anymore. Ten years ago, the “new” .NET (a.k.a. .NET Core) didn’t even exist, but today I can just create a project in the current .NET Version (on Windows, because this is what I use) and it will just run on any Raspberry PI (very likely not on Windows).
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Back then, I didn’t want to put the PI inside the weather station because I wanted to keep it in the house and also use it for other things (I didn’t explicitly write it, but I remember that I actually had home automation in mind). So I bought a Tinkerforge WIFI Master Extension.
But:
a) now there’s the Raspberry PI Zero W, which is ridiculously cheap AND has Wi-Fi
b) Home Assistant, the home automation solution I evaluated so far, seems to “prefer” running on a dedicated machine anyway.
I have zero Home Assistant experience so far, but just from reading the documentation, it looks like that: the easiest installation method comes with its own operating system, and manually installing HA on an existing OS seems to be the hardest installation method.
⇒ it doesn’t make sense to have a Raspberry PI running in the house 24/7 that does nothing but power the weather station. So the obvious choice is removing the Wi-Fi module and putting a Raspberry PI Zero W directly into the weather station.
(I still have the old Raspberry PI from 2013, but it has no Wi-Fi)
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I wanted (and still want) to periodically save the current temperature, humidity etc. somewhere and do something cool with it.
In 2013, the Tinkerforge docs recommended Xively for this, but today their website doesn’t even load anymore, and according to Wikipedia they were bought by Google years ago.
In 2024, there are waaay more cloud services, and there’s probably one that makes perfect sense for a requirement like this (and has a free tier that’s enough for my needs).
I don’t have any experience building stuff for/in the cloud yet, so I will use this project to get my feet wet.
So this is a but vague, but I’m planning to:
- periodically send temperature etc. somewhere to The Cloud™ and store it there (not for all eternity, just the last few days?)
- eventually use this data to create an auto-refreshing “this is the current weather in my garden” site with some nice graphs,
weather.christianspecht.de or something like that.
The application so far
The code is here on GitHub: https://github.com/christianspecht/weather-station
It’s .NET 8 (the current LTS version). At the time of writing this post, it consists of nothing but a simple “Hello World” example (similar to the one in the 2013 blog posts), which shows the current temperature on the display.
Next (before I write the next post), I will add more functionality to the application, similar to the two tutorials in the Tinkerforge docs: read the values of all sensors and make use of the buttons to show different things on the display. And after that, I will start with the cloud stuff.
