Hi everyone,
I am rather late to the party here, but am thinking about how to design a environmental monitoring project for my local community allotment /orchard group. There would be a lot of interest in rain soil and air temperatures it's also an exposed site so wind data would be accurate, yes a weather station.
I can see an educational benefit AC as BC we used to have a lot of school/community group visits to the site. (before covid)
There are a few constraints, as its an eco-friendly place I don't expect a sensor tree or Davis type station would be acceptable. There are no nearby mains supplies electrons and the nearest wi-fi is about 150M from my proposed monitoring location, the composting toilet block
Having spent most of this weekend hacking around there is a bewildering number of options none of which seem to quite fit my requirements. I would like to upload near real-time data to the interwebs (inspires interest) and I'm capable of home brew, my hardware is better than my software, need to end up with something reliable and maintainable.
I'm thinking of starting with air and soil temps,
The ecowitt HP3501 almost fits the bill, but I am not sure the 868MHz wireless range will be acceptable for ground sensors if the console is inside the nearest building - how can I be sure, and does anyone have any experience?
Failing that can anyone please suggest a telemetry hub design/product which is low power, I can remove batteries for re-charging or add solar and wind wind charging, flexible and expandable and easy to connect to software to molish it into custom web pages e.g. WEEWX