What's needed to make weather pico w operational?

Hi All,

New forum member here. Got directed here from discussion on the RPI forum looking for outdoor wireless weather sensor package. The RPI is sitting indoors connected to my network and has radio link to outdoor sensor package.

The weather pico w product came up as a suggestion.

I’ve looked at the online shop & docs but it’s not clear to me what is sold in the shop and what else is needed to make the part operational. The shop says sold is ‘Board Only’. So is that only the PCB and I need to get the parts and solder them on? Or is the board populated? What else is needed to make the whole think operational. (I guess a battery pack). What else?

What software stack do I need on the indoor RPI (will probably be a model 4)? How exactly does the radio communication wort between the weather pico w and the indoor? Do they use BT or Wifi?

How user modifiable is the software on the sensor package? Is the code open source?

I’ll probably have more question going forward with the project.

Thanks & Cheers,
Gert

If your referring to this,
Enviro Weather (Pico W Aboard) - Board Only (pimoroni.com)
Board Only just means its not a kit, no extras included. The “Board” is populated.
It can measure Temperature, Humidity and pressure out of the box.
If you want to measure Wind and Rain you need to buy those sensors separately or just buy the full kit. The full kit with the extras is here,
Enviro Weather (Pico W Aboard) - Weather Station Kit (pimoroni.com)

Hi,

Thanks for the info. I was confused by their wording referring to ‘board only’.

Wondering if there is documentation about the connectivity tot he indoor unit. Wifi, BT?? Mainly concerned if additional receiving hardware is required for the indoor RPI.

Cheers,
Gert

It’s being worked on, pimoroni/enviro-ble (github.com)
I’m also interested in sending data from an Enviro to another Pico to be viewed.

Other options are MQTT over WIFI. I haven’t sat down and tried any of so far.

1 Like

@alphanumeric

Interesting info. Would BLE have power consumption advantage over wifi? (I.e. shorter duty cycle to upload data to BLE master?) Would be nice to see sample code on an RPI4 for BLE input.

Cheers,
Gert

I would think BLE would use less battery power than WIFI.