Implementation of a low-cost weather station developed in design-based learning framework

Abstract

Teaching about climate change with project- based learning is one of the key strategies for future perspective of human behaviour. This work is focused on the development of a low-cost weather station prototype for the measurements of atmospheric parameters. Teams of high school students have been set up for carrying out the work, with the supervision of teachers and experts, including companies in the sensor industry and agriculture. The proposed project concerns a general purpose system, able to manage several types of sensors and tested with most of them, from tipping bucket rain gauges, magnetic reed devices anemometers, capacitive/resistive thermohygrometers, and innovative impact piezo-element rain gauge. The control block based on ARDUINO and Raspberry systems, is interfaced with an IoT infrastructure to take advantage of low-cost communication technologies, and to exploit the possibility of dislocating several sensors linked to one control system. Some very low-cost sensors solutions have been selected for a preliminary implementation of the weather system: barometric, thermohygrometric and piezo-element impact rain sensors. During a period of about one year the weather station has been tested in outdoor, also numerically comparing the sensors measurements with official measures.