A low cost wireless data acquisition system for weather station monitoring

In this paper, the development of wireless data acquisition system (WDAS) for weather station monitoring is described. It is based on the Emitter/Receiver architecture and it does not require the physical connection of the monitored systems to the data collection server. The proposed system consists of a set of sensors for measuring meteorological parameters (solar radiation, temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed & direction, rain fall, etc.). The collected data are first conditioned using precision electronic circuits and then interfaced to a PC using RS232 connection via wireless unit. The LabVIEW program is used to further process, display and store the collected data in the PC disk. The proposed architecture permits the rapid system development and has the advantage of flexibility and it can be easily extended for controlling the renewable energy systems like photovoltaic system. The measured parameters are available on-line over the internet to any user.