Week 1 (6th Feb 2015)

This is the first lab day of our Year 2 Project. We three group members are researching project of wireless weather station under the guidance of Professor Jeremy Smith. The project aims at designing a weather system which can detect the wind speed, wind direction, rain gauge and temperature through the sensors and then processed the data through mbed microcontrollers and then display the weather information.

During the lab day, first, we three students discussed about the general design and work out a block diagram to represent our basic idea:

We collected the required equipment including:

• WH1081 which offers the wind and rain gauge sensors
• Temperature and Pressure sensor
• Mbed microcontroller FRDM-KL46Z connected with Xbee kit
• LPC1768 with display

We started with assembling the wind and rain gauge, it has been completed as shown below:

After that, we did a little bit soldering work to realize combination of FRDM-KL46Z, XBee and SD Shield:

The most important task of our first lab day was getting familiar with the XBee and programming to realize data transferred between microcontrollers. However, because we haven't contacted to this field, we met several problems with programming. There are still a lot of research work to do about the XBee. 

In addition, we started to get familiar with the FRDM-KL46Z and LPC1768 about their functions and characteristics. We will continue our work and update our progress in time.