Step 4: Wiring up the Weather Station Receiver and Programming the Indoor Arduino
The indoor Arduino is inside our building, and is responsible for receiving the data from the outdoor Arduino, validating the data then posting the data to an internet aggregator (ThingSpeak). To build it, we first soldered header pins onto the Ethernet shield and the second XBee shield. We then inserted the Ethernet shield and XBee shield into the Arduino Mega according to the schematics provided with the shields. We again used X-CTU software to program the appropriate destination address and download the required firmware to the XBee shield. Next, we programmed the Arduino to receive XBee messages and forward these messages at a rate of once per minute to ThingSpeak using the Ethernet connection. Prior to sending messages to ThingSpeak, we setup an account and configured the channel and field information. Once we have the station sending data to ThingSpeak, we are ready to start looking at the data with MATLAB.
Note that to reproduce the analysis entailed in the article, you do not need to set up the hardware. Live data from our setup is available on channel 12397 of ThingSpeak.com.