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We admit, we see a lot of weather stations. What makes [Mike Diamond’s] take on this old favorite interesting is that it is tiny enough to carry with you, and uses your cell phone as a hotspot to deliver its data. Of course, that assumes you have a phone that can act as a hotspot.
The parts are straightforward, a power supply, an ESP8266, and a weather sensor board. It looks as though you could easily slip the whole affair into a tube or maybe a 3D printed enclosure. We were a little concerned about the bare wire used, but as [Mike] points out you can use insulated wire if you like, and we’d encourage you to do so.
There are some modifications required including removing the pin headers. [Mike] uses the old trick of smacking your hand on the table after melting the pins. You can also heat up each pin and pull it out with pliers. Or, if you have a hot air gun, get all the pins molten at once — just don’t heat up more of the board than you need.
On the data end, the ESP8266 uses Cayenne to transmit data which is the same kind of IoT backend we see a lot lately. On the one hand, this allows you to distribute it without developing a phone application. On the other hand, we would have been tempted to just make the ESP8266 a web server and populate a simple web page. Of course, you could still do that if you wanted to.
We’ve seen plenty of weather stations, but a lot of them are not nearly as compact. If you want to go old school, there’s always the TI 99/4A weather station.
