Feature Article: IoT-Based Weather Monitoring

Development of a
Cost-Effective
IoT-Based Weather
Monitoring System
Debashish Mohapatra Bidyadhar Subudhi
National Institute of Technology Rourkela Indian Institute of Technology Goa

Abstract—This work explores the development and deployment of a cost-effective IoT

platform to monitor and archival weather data, namely temperature, humidity,
atmospheric pressure, and dust particles in a residential area, using open-source
technologies. The IoT device sends the data to a remote virtual private server (VPS) over
the Internet. A server application runs 24x7 to collect the data and logs it into a database.
The necessary steps to set up a VPS server, secure it and install the IoT server application
implementing the message queuing telemetry transport protocol are also described. The
complete system is verified by real-time implementation using IoT devices, namely
NodeMCU ESP 8266 and Raspberry Pi Zero W, along with suitable sensors. The work
demonstrates the proof-of-concept feasibility of developing and deploying a scalable
weather station from scratch using open-source technologies for faster time to market
and the privacy and safety concerns with the end product.

& IOT DEVICES ARE finding an ever-increasing use
in our everyday lives. From monitoring weather
parameters across the globe for weather forecast-
ing to health monitoring applications, such as blood
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2021.3136833
Date of publication 4 January 2022; date of current version 17
August 2022.
glucose, blood pressure, seizures, and industrial
process monitoring, IoT devices are extensively
used to gather all sorts of data. One can use the
commercially available solutions to use the data
from IoT devices in a specific field. However,
depending on certain situations, such as privacy,
security, and cost, one may choose to deploy his
own IoT platform using existing technologies.

September/October 2022 Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society 2162-2248 ß 2022 IEEE
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 IoT-Based Weather Monitoring
In this article, we explore such a deployment to
build a local weather station using IoT devices.
Recent works have been done in this field demon-
strating the successful use of IoT devices to moni-
tor weather data for smart agriculture.1 The use of
open-source platforms has two crucial advantages.
First, being open source, their design can be inte-
grated into a consumer product with ease. All the
design schematics are readily available without
any significant investments to buy Intellectual
property rights, which keeps the cost of the end
product low. This also makes the time-to-market
faster than developing the hardware from
scratch.2 This helps a producer who is just ventur-
ing out into producing consumer technology
instead of being a passive consumer. Second, the
producer can ensure no hidden loopholes or back
doors in any of the hardware or software by using
open-source technologies. The developers have a
clear picture of developing or improving upon the
low-level open-source codes for the programmable
IoT devices,3 which increases privacy and safety.
High-volume production of the consumer product
will benefit the producer in terms of profit gener-
ated from increased sales, whereas it will become
more affordable for the consumer.
This article describes how we have chosen
between the widely available IoT devices and
sensors. The setup of an IoT server with the
MQTT protocol4,5 from the ground-up has also
been explained. A real-time dashboard has been
configured to show the incoming data from the
IoT devices using the Thingsboard application.6
MOTIVATION
Commercially available IoT weather-monitor-
ing systems are closed source in nature. We
believe closed-source software lead to monopoly
of corporations. Open-source software enables
other manufacturers to modify, develop, and
improve upon it. Moreover, for a privacy con-
cerned consumer, he/she can look into the source
code of the open-source software to ensure his
rights to privacy are honored by the device manu-
facturer, whereas in closed-source software it is
not possible.
CONTRIBUTION
The contribution of this work is to demonstrate
the feasibility of developing and deploying a proof-
of-concept scalable IoT weather station using
open-source technologies, which can be adapted
and extended by consumer technology producers.
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IOT ARCHITECTURE
Figure 1 shows the IoT architecture of the pro-
posed weather station to be designed. The IoT
nodes consist of the IoT processor/microcontrol-
ler, such as a Raspberry Pi7 or a NodeMCU
ESP8266.8 The sensors are connected to the
nodes via different interfaces, such as analog-to-
digital converter, I2C, one-wire, or Serial Periph-
eral Interface Bus. The IoT nodes are connected
to the IoT server via the Internet. The IoT server
runs on a remote computer, in this case, a VPS.
The IoT server consists of a service that listens to
the new data incoming from the IoT nodes. MQTT
is one such protocol that handles transmitting
and receiving data to and from IoT devices. A
database is installed on the IoT server to store
the device telemetry data for future analysis. The
Thingsboard application programming interface
(API) provides user commands to access the data
or modify any settings of the IoT server. The
Thingsboard server has a real-time dashboard,
via which users can see and configure the real-
time device telemetry data and historical data.
The Thingsboard API also provides the means to
query the server’s data via secured hypertext
transfer protocol (HTTPS) post commands, which
helps analyze the data using external tools, such
as machine learning tools available with Python.
IOT HARDWARE
For every IoT application, the IoT hardware is
that interacts with the environment. The first
component of any IoT hardware is the one that
receives some input from the environment.
Depending on the desired input, it can be a
microphone, a motion sensor, or a sensor
designed to measure any environmental parame-
ter such as temperature, barometric pressure,
humidity, and dust particulates. The IoT device
can also be an end-user device, such as a smart
light bulb or a smart speaker. What is common
with IoT devices is communicating with a server
or with each other over the Internet.
There are many choices available to choose IoT
hardware. In this demonstration, it was decided to
design a weather station on an IoT platform using
open-source and low-cost sensors.
Choosing the IoT Client/Node
Any embedded microprocessor or microcon-
troller can be used as the IoT client to send the
data to the server/logger. One can choose from
many available open-source hardware platforms.
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
Figure 1. Typical IoT architecture utilizing MQTT.

One can choose the IoT platform based on the
allowable portability, power consumption, and
device cost. A few of these widely available plat-
forms are noted in Table 1.
Since it was decided to use the existing Internet
connection for transmitting the data, any IoT plat-
form with the Wi-Fi connectivity option could be
selected. Table 1 shows that for a small weather
station with four–five sensors, the best option is
the NodeMCU IoT board with ESP8266 system on a
chip. However, the Raspberry Pi Zero W single-
board computer (SBC) was also selected as the
target IoT platform because of its ability to pro-
gram it remotely using the Jupyter integrated
development environment (IDE) for Python.
Choice of the Sensors for Weather Station
For the demonstration purpose, we decided
to report the temperature, atmospheric pres-
sure, and humidity. However, one can add ambient
light, wind-speed, and various pollution indicators,
such as PM 2.5 particulates (or dust sensor), car-
bon dioxide, carbon monoxide, etc. Some of the
widely available sensors are listed in Table 2.

Table 1. Some popular open-source IoT hardware platforms.

Programming Connectivity Approx. cost

IoT platform Processor
environment option (USD)
1.5 GHz Quad Core 64-bit ARM
Raspberry Pi 4 SBC7 Python, C/C++ Wi-Fi, Ethernet 35
Processor

Raspberry Pi Zero W 1 GHz, Single Core CPU Python, C/C++ Wi-Fi 15

Arduino Uno/Pro/ Add-on GSM/

16 MHz, 8-bit MCU C++ via Arduino IDE 5–15
Mini Wi-Fi

84 MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 Add-on GSM/

Arduino Due C++ via Arduino IDE 40
MCU Wi-Fi

Node MCU ESP 8266 Arduino IDE,

32-bit RISC CPU Wi-Fi 05
Board8 MicroPython

Linkit One9 260 MHz, ARM7 MCU Arduino IDE Wi-Fi, GSM 60

September/October 2022
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 IoT-Based Weather Monitoring
Table 2. Available sensors.
Cost
Parameter Sensor Interface
(USD)
Temperature LM 35 Analog
Barometric
BMP180 I2C
Pressure
Humidity DHT22 1-Wire
Dust Sensor GP2Y1010AU0F Analog
In this experiment, three sensors are used: a
DHT22 humidity sensor, a BMP085 atmospheric
pressure sensor, and a Sharp GP2Y1010AU0F dust
sensor. Both DHT22 and BMP085 can provide tem-
perature readings, which reduces the number of
sensors needed with the microcontroller.
Internet Connectivity Options
All IoT devices must talk over the Internet.
Depending on how they are deployed in the field,
one may choose any available option, enabling
the IoT device to communicate to the IoT server
over the Internet successfully. Therefore, if the
IoT device is deployed in a remote area, global
system for mobile communications (GSM) can be
chosen. A GSM module can be used with all the
IoT devices mentioned previously to provide a
general packet radio service connection. More-
over, if an SBC such as the Raspberry Pi is chosen
as the IoT hardware, then a 3G/4G USB dongle
can be used to provide the necessary Internet
connectivity. In this case, since the IoT device
was to be kept just outside the laboratory’s win-
dow, it was decided to use the existing Internet
connection of the lab via Raspberry Pi Zero W
and ESP8266’s integrated Wi-Fi connectivity.
IoT Device Programming
Based on which platform is chosen as the IoT
client, the device’s programming will differ. Even
though it has a minimal form factor, the Raspberry
Pi is a full-fledged computer, with a powerful quad-
core processor and sufficient RAM to run a Linux
operating system quite well. The Jupyter Note-
book can be configured on the Raspberry Pi,
which can be accessed from the local area net-
work, just by providing the IP address of the SBC.
This allows users to write Python programs for
the Raspberry Pi remotely. Once the program is
ready, it is converted into a script to run on sys-
tem boot continuously, which reports the sensor
data to the IoT server on the cloud.
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Figure 2 shows the IoT device’s operational
flowchart used to publish/transmit the weather
telemetry data to the MQTT broker/server. During
the IoT device’s programming/development, it is
0.5 useful to have serial debugging to identify any pro-
gram faults. However, once the program works
1
fine and the device is ready for deployment, the
extra commands for serial printing and debugging
4
should be removed to minimize the power usage.
5
CHOOSING THE IOT SERVER
All IoT devices must either communicate to
a central server or with each other based on
the requirement. Many different techniques can
be employed to establish communication with
the IoT server. The MQTT protocol is the most
popular method to implement communication
between IoT devices over the Internet. In this
experiment, it was decided to set up an IoT
server using open-source software.
Setting Up a Low-Cost VPS
For a weather station to work as expected, the
IoT server needs to be running 24x7 and have a reli-
able Internet connection. The IoT server need not
have high hardware specifications, such as a dedi-
cated server used to host commercial websites.
One can choose to deploy a virtual private server
for this purpose. Many reputed commercial VPS
providers provide a VPS with limited resources for
a reasonable and minimal fee. The most important
feature of a VPS is that it remains online 24x7 so
that when the IoT device reports the data, it is
received by the IoT server and gets logged into the
database for future analysis.
Installing and Configuring the IoT Server
Application
Many open-source software bundles provide
the MQTT protocol for IoT applications. The
“Thingsboard” platform was chosen as the desired
software suite to act as the IoT server software. It
acts as an MQTT broker and has many additional
features such as real-time data streaming analytic
and a front-end to display the telemetry data as
interactive graphs, charts, and gadgets. The
“PostgreSQL” database was chosen as the data
storage software for storing the IoT device data.
The “Thingsboard” front-end can be accessed
from the configured domain/subdomain.
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

Figure 2. Operational flowchart of the IoT weather
station.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
IoT Hardware Implementation
Figure 3 shows two different hardware imple-
mentations of the IoT devices. The first one uses
a Raspberry Pi Zero W board, as shown in
Figure 3(a), and the second one is using an
ESP8266 Module, as shown in Figure 3(b).
It should be noted that both the IoT device
implementations are connected to a 5 V power
supply through a micro-USB interface. Both of the
IoT devices require about 100 to 400 mA current,
depending on the usage. However, suppose low
reporting rates (e.g., one sample per second or
slower) is acceptable. In that case, the ESP 8266
device can be configured for deep-sleep modes,
which reduces the overall power consumption sig-
nificantly. The deep-sleep mode is a desirable fea-
ture for the remote implementation of IoT devices.
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Figure 3. IoT devices interfaced with an
atmospheric pressure sensor (BMP085) and a
humidity sensor (DHT22/AM2302). (a) Raspberry Pi
Zero W as IoT device. (b) ESP 8266 IoT device.
IoT Device Streaming Telemetry
Once the devices were set up successfully, the
reported data were verified on the Thingsboard
dashboard on the VPS. Figure 4 shows the config-
ured dashboard to show the charts, graphs, and
widgets with a real-time update from the last three
days. The user can also query a specific range of
data displayed on the graphs by setting a query
window within a range of dates and times.
Extraction of the Telemetry History
The Thingsboard API provides an HTTP/HTTPS
POST command to retrieve the data for any teleme-
try data for any device from the PostgreSQL data-
base on the VPS after successful authentication
with the Thingsboard IoT server instance. The data
between a specific range of dates and times can be
queried using the Requests library in Python, which
results in a JSON file. After converting the JSON file
to a Pandas data-frame, it becomes easy to analyze
the data using appropriate software tools to
deduce essential information, which can help
design better consumer technologies.
CONCLUSION
A weather monitoring system was developed
with temperature, humidity, pressure, and a
dust sensor using embedded IoT devices. A VPS
was configured to run the IoT server software
“Thingsboard” utilizing the MQTT protocol.
Important weather parameters were gathered in
a residential area, which can be further extended
and used in different ways as identified by the
consumer technology producers. This paves
ways to develop new consumer technologies, as
well as to improve upon the existing ones.
85
 IoT-Based Weather Monitoring
Figure 4. Screenshot of the configured Thingsboard dashboard.
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Debashish Mohapatra is currently an embedded
systems developer at Pragathi Solutions, Bengaluru,
India. Mohapatra received the B.Tech. degree in
applied electronics and instrumentation engineering
from the Biju Patnaik University of Technology, Rour-
kela, India, in 2005, and the M.Tech. degree in control
and automation and the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from the National Institute of Technology
Rourkela, Rourkela, in 2015 and 2021, respectively.
Contact him at admin@debashish.info.
Bidyadhar Subudhi is currently a professor with the
School of Electrical Sciences, Indian Institute of Tech-
nology Goa, Ponda, India. Subudhi received the B.S.
degree from the National Institute of Technology Rour-
kela, Rourkela, India, in 1988 and the master’s degree
from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi,
India, in 1994, both in electrical engineering, and the
Ph.D. degree in control and instrumentation from the
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, U.K., in 2003. Contact
him at bidyadhar@iitgoa.ac.in.
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine