IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2022 - 82

IoT-Based Weather Monitoring
In this article, we explore such a deployment to
build a local weather station using IoT devices.
Recent works have been done in this field demonstrating
the successful use of IoT devices to monitor
weather data for smart agriculture.1 The use of
open-source platforms has two crucial advantages.
First, being open source, their design can be integrated
into a consumer product with ease. All the
design schematics are readily available without
any significant investments to buy Intellectual
property rights, which keeps the cost of the end
product low. This also makes the time-to-market
faster than developing the hardware from
scratch.2 This helps a producer who is just venturing
out into producing consumer technology
instead of being a passive consumer. Second, the
producer can ensure no hidden loopholes or back
doors in any of the hardware or software by using
open-source technologies. The developers have a
clear picture of developing or improving upon the
low-level open-source codes for the programmable
IoT devices,3 which increases privacy and safety.
High-volume production of the consumer product
will benefit the producer in terms of profit generated
from increased sales, whereas it will become
more affordable for the consumer.
This article describes how we have chosen
between the widely available IoT devices and
sensors. The setup of an IoT server with the
MQTT protocol4,5 from the ground-up has also
been explained. A real-time dashboard has been
configured to show the incoming data from the
IoT devices using the Thingsboard application.6
MOTIVATION
Commercially available IoT weather-monitoringsystems
areclosedsourcein nature. We
believe closed-source software lead to monopoly
of corporations. Open-source software enables
other manufacturers to modify, develop, and
improve upon it. Moreover, for a privacy concerned
consumer, he/she can look into the source
code of the open-source software to ensure his
rights to privacy are honored by the device manufacturer,
whereas in closed-source software it is
not possible.
CONTRIBUTION
The contribution of this work is to demonstrate
the feasibility of developing and deploying a proofof-concept
scalable IoT weather station using
open-source technologies, which can be adapted
and extended by consumer technologyproducers.
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IOT ARCHITECTURE
Figure 1 shows the IoT architecture of the proposed
weather station to be designed. The IoT
nodes consist of the IoT processor/microcontroller,
such as a Raspberry Pi7
or a NodeMCU
ESP8266.8 The sensors are connected to the
nodes via different interfaces, such as analog-todigital
converter, I2C, one-wire, or Serial Peripheral
Interface Bus. The IoT nodes are connected
to the IoT server via the Internet. The IoT server
runs on a remote computer, in this case, a VPS.
The IoT server consists of a service that listens to
the new data incoming from the IoT nodes. MQTT
is one such protocol that handles transmitting
and receiving data to and from IoT devices. A
database is installed on the IoT server to store
the device telemetry data for future analysis. The
Thingsboard application programming interface
(API) provides user commands to access the data
or modify any settings of the IoT server. The
Thingsboard server has a real-time dashboard,
via which users can see and configure the realtime
device telemetry data and historical data.
The Thingsboard API also provides the means to
query the server's data via secured hypertext
transfer protocol (HTTPS) post commands, which
helps analyze the data using external tools, such
as machine learning tools available with Python.
IOT HARDWARE
For every IoT application, the IoT hardware is
that interacts with the environment. The first
component of any IoT hardware is the one that
receives some input from the environment.
Depending on the desired input, it can be a
microphone, a motion sensor, or a sensor
designed to measure any environmental parameter
such as temperature, barometric pressure,
humidity, and dust particulates. The IoT device
can also be an end-user device, such as a smart
light bulb or a smart speaker. What is common
with IoT devices is communicating with a server
or with each other over the Internet.
There are many choices available to choose IoT
hardware. In this demonstration, it was decided to
design a weather station on an IoT platform using
open-source and low-cost sensors.
Choosing the IoT Client/Node
Any embedded microprocessor or microcontroller
can be used as the IoT client to send the
data to the server/logger. One can choose from
many available open-source hardware platforms.
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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2022

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