Juan Peña/Sparkfun/CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

With Hurricane Sandy roaring towards the East Coast of the US, the world is again turning to Twitter to get instant, personal weather reports and photos directly from those affected by the storm. The ability of Twitter to spread pinpoint, as-it-happens information is the exact reason it shines so bright in the face of natural disasters (and civil strife). But for those directly experiencing the hurricane's dangerous conditions, mindfully tweeting weather updates can quickly become a secondary concern at best.

With the accessibility of easily configurable, low-energy-consuming technology, we can mitigate part of that problem by building a not-too-tricky, self-tweeting weather station. It's probably too late to put one together for Hurricane Sandy, but for upcoming weather situations it's a good way to help keep people informed with data and details.

One of the easiest approaches to the project involves setting up an Arduino-controlled weather monitoring system. The easily programmed, modular ability of the Arduino platform allows for a variety of add-on sensors to be utilised, including temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. These sensors can be found pre-built onto one Arduino board, as is the case with SparkFun's USB Weather Board, which adds the capability for its data to be recorded or shared via its USB output, or wirelessly with an optional Xbee or Bluetooth module.

For more detailed reporting, the Weather Board mates up to SparkFun's Weather Meter to record wind speed, wind direction, and rainfall. This information becomes crucial in hurricane situations -- rainfall and wind speed are the most common measures of a storm's severity.

To send the data from the Arduino board to Twitter, you'll need an Ethernet shield (a standard add-on board that lets you connect your Arduino to the web via an active Ethernet connection), a bit of code and a dedicated Twitter account. You'll set up the Arduino so the specific sensor data are parsed at regular intervals directly to the Twitter account.

More specifically, the Twitter-coding aspect will require downloading and installing a few pieces of information (libraries) to help establish the transmitting capabilities of the Arduino, and uploading a small program (called a sketch in Arduino terms) to your board. This  Tronixstuff post steps through the specific code required to establish the connection, and then lays out the process needed to manipulate the code so it tweets specific information when certain parameters are met.

Using a store-bought all-in-one weather monitoring station with a data output jack, Open Electronics continues the lesson, detailing  all the steps required to automate uploading the data to your individual Wunderground weather page -- or, similar to above, to a Twitter account. Their post includes the specific code needed to hack the monitor and Arduino together and get your weather conditions broadcast to the world.

If you'd like an easier route to enable an existing computer to be a weather transmitter, the Weather Display software combines early-'90s meteorology graphics with 2012 auto-tweeting capabilities, letting you skip the Arduino and Ethernet shields to send out your information. However, as power outages are common in bad weather, you'll likely want a large battery backup to keep your system running; Arduino-controlled systems have much lower power requirements.

Anytime you're dealing with extreme weather, remember that your safety is the first and most important element -- please do not put yourself in danger just to set one of these projects up.

Source: Wired.com


Latest on wired.co.uk