Weather Station

Altera_Forum · ‎11-02-2011

Dear Friends,

Can anyone reply if I am going in the right path to develop a Weather Station using NIOS II and the following sensors.

1. For Temperature and Humidity - Sensirion make

2. For Pressure and Altitude - Freescale make

3. For Latitude and Logitude - Fastraxgps make

4. RTC can be in-built

All will be digital interface with SPI or I2C.

LCD Display of these with Datalogging of samples which can be saved using a GUI on a PC.

Keys to select sample rate of datas and to set Date and Time.

Thanks in Advance.

With Kind Regards,

S.Saravanan

Altera_Forum · ‎11-02-2011

Nios, and more in general FPGAs, can virtually read any sensor with a digital interface.

If the sensors you found have spi or i2c, then the task is rather easy, at least at hardware level. You only have to write the proper code to extract data from sensors.

Regarding RTC, you probably need an external device, since one usually wants date and time to be preserved when you turn off the equipment or across power faults; FPGA doesn't support a battery backup feature, then you would lose the rtc information.

Look for example Dallas DS1302, DS1306 or similar: besides the RTC function they also provide a small NV memory which can be useful to store some data.

Altera_Forum · ‎11-02-2011

Dear Cris72,

Thanks for your reply.

I shall stick to maxim-ic's RTC as I usually buy components from maxim.

The Datalogger using FPGA is being developed because, the DS1616 datalogger IC of Maxim Integrated Circuits became obsolete due to their non-obsolescence program ! I think so, Hence I am forced to redesign the datalogger adding additional features like Pressure, Altitude and GPS info.

But I am unable to implement Wind Speed due to mechanical constructions.

Regards,

S.Saravanan

Altera_Forum · ‎11-03-2011

Dallas is now part of Maxim ;)

Any reason why you don't want to use a standard microcontroller for this task rather than an FPGA? For those kind of buses I don't really see the advantage of using an FPGA. A simple microcontroller with a bunch of serial inputs/outputs would be a lot simpler.

Altera_Forum · ‎11-03-2011

Dear Friend,

My interest is towards RTOS for which I have selected uCOS-II at the moment to implement the weather station using NIOS-II.

This is an alternative to using an ARM processor as I had atmel AT920T which was centered around a kwikbyte's KB9202 Board and became obsolete by now.

While hunting for a low power ARM to support these sensors seems to be a daunting task.

RTOS should be used for this application and hence I am choosing this option.

Secondly these sensors along with some supporting peripherals will be connected to an ANDROID 2.3 based phone like Samsung Galaxy - Y ( entry level Smart Phone ). The parameters will be read using an App developed using Android SDK.

I am looking at both these designs to go hand in hand.

Your advice is solicited from time to time as the design is on its way.

With Kind Regards,

Altera_Forum · ‎11-03-2011

Our company has moved some things into FPGA to avoid issues with other devices going obsolete. At least the fpga stuff can be moved onto newer device families.