Raspberry Pi Weather Station w/LCD Display – Project – Case Study

Environment: Personal / Commercial / Industrial
Customer wants to have up to date weather data for their area that can be logged / trended for later retrieval.
Optional Internal Temperature Reading for Trending Status.
Ability to control an external system on extreme setpoints.
Option to Predict Future Weather for several days.

Customer has BAS (Building Automated System) not connected to Internet.
Various zones that are Thermal Sensitive with Humidity Influence.
Various Outside Air Temperature (OAT) sensors, some connected to the BAS.
Customer doesn’t want the BAS To communicate with the outside world (Security Issues and I.T. policy’s).
Suggested to Customer to also have the BAS to communicate with the extra hardware (via intranet and SQL data).
Customer also wants the screen results to be displayed in the CEO’s, CIO’s and the Production Managers Offices.

To keep costs down, 3x Raspberry Pis were acquired with LCD screens.
Fully secure Lynx OS were installed into the PI’s.
Web Scripts were installed to get area weather for the site.
Custom software was written in Python for each Pi.
Through the I.T.’s networking gateways, one Pi was able to acquire the weather data for the area and store it onto an internal SQL data server for all 3 Pi’s.
Another custom script was written for the BAS to get access to the SQL weather data.
The SQL data server handled all the trending for the weather data.

3x locations in the company now have up to date weather data for the area.
Each screen can display warnings based on user-configured set-points.
Multi-Color Screens act based on set-points.
Data is Trended for Retrieval on the SQL Data Server (Customer Supplied).
BAS has connection to weather data without sacrificing security policy’s.
Using the BAS weather prediction can be achievable, but not under this scope.
By using the Raspberry Pis energy usage is minimal (less than a standard computer) with all the power of a dedicated system and can be replaced with minimal costs.