About: I am a DIY hobbyist by passion and Power Engineer by profession. Most of my works are related to Solar Energy and Arduino. Apart from Electronics I love 3D printing, Woodworking and to make crafts from used …

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In a country like India, most of the people are dependent on agriculture. For effective planning in agriculture, the weather forecast is of utmost importance. So farmers are always interested in the Weather Forecasts. As farmers stay in remote areas, they have to wait for the news updates on TV, Radio or News Papers. Unfortunately, this weather information is not the accurate data of their local environment rather it gives data of the nearest weather forecasting station.

Being the son of a farmer, I decided to monitor the local weather and inform to my father earlier. So that he can take an early decision for his farm.

You can find all of my projects on https://www.opengreenenergy.com/

My weather stations typically consist of two major parts:

1. The sensors that sit outside and measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, and barometric pressure. This data is sent wirelessly through an RF transmitter module to the display unit. I named the entire module as Transmitter module. (Tx).



2. The display unit that lives inside in a convenient place so anyone can read the external temperature, humidity, etc. It equipped with an RF receiver to receive data from the transmitter module. I named it as Receiver module (Rx).



Both the modules are run by the Arduino microcontrollers.



As the transmitter module is deployed in the field, we have to deal with power management. It is impractical to run a long cable to provide power to the sensor’s location. This leaves relatively few practical options.



1. Connecting directly an Arduino board to a battery. Though it sounds good and obviously it would work, but your battery would be depleted in a matter of days because some components like voltage regulators, power led and USB interfacing chip in the Arduino board are always drawing power.

But nowadays high capacity battery packs are readily available in the market. Solar panels are getting more efficient and cheaper. Adding a boost converter in the circuits extract every last drop of juice out of battery.



2. Putting the Arduino to “sleep mode" to consume even less power.

You can see it in the step-11 and 12.



In this guide, I will teach new skills on how you can make a solar powered battery pack for your Arduino and how Arduino power consumption can be optimized by putting it into sleep mode.



By using the above technique you can run your sensor related or any other stand-alone Arduino project for a long time.