Senior Member
Joined: 17/11/2011
Location: AustraliaPosts: 231
| Posted: 02:48pm 04 Mar 2012 |
Weather station design notes:
Some weather station design gotchas.
Having the MaxiMite board "out in the elements" requires moisture and corrosion protection. Most industrial outside enclosures incorporate a strip heater to rid the box of moisture and corrosion. This takes AC mains power.
Another way, is to conformal coat the board for outside use even though it is installed in an enclosure. This could be easily done but the SD connector cannot be coated! Note: New conformal coatings can be removed from the board with a chemical stripper.
Another way is to run cabling inside but this would risk of lightning strike or fire. This would require signal isolation in electronics but it is very hard to isolate analog signals and this is very costly.
Most commercial weather stations, now days, incorporate a wireless link to isolate the electronics from lightning.
Still another way is to network the custom weather station via CAN. Having an isolated CAN interface allows great flexibility in allowing additional other user design applications to exist.