Weather Station Display Upgrade
So, my weather station mostly worked great, except that I would occasionally lose the outdoor sensor signal. Then it would be a few hours before it found it again. I don’t know if my sensor is just a little too far away or what. I did some searching and found they sell another compatible display model that actually has a full LCD screen. More importantly, it features an EXTERNAL antenna. So I upgraded to this:
As you can see, the display is beautiful and has 3 info screens. Outdoor info, Indoor info, and then Records. This unit can store up to a year of data its collected. Since it has a real LCD screen, you can even display graphs of rainfall or windspeed etc. I get a perfect reliable signal now. The only negative is that there is no battery backup. Which means if the unit loses power for too long, you will lose your data and have to start over from scratch. So seeing as I have a 12v solar setup for my Ham Radio stuff, I thought, why not run it off of that. So I chopped up the power adapter for my weather station and wired this DC regulator in.
It takes 12v DC in and puts out 5v DC which is what my weather station uses. I was worried the weather station might use alot of power and drain my battery, but after some measurements, it only needs 0.13 amps at 12v DC to run. Thats not much at all and shouldnt be a burden on my system.