i thought i’d share one of a esphome project that i’ve been working on over the last little while, the OpenWeather32, an Open Source ESP32 based weather and air quality station, designed around sensors supported by ESPHome. I designed it to be beginner friendly all thru hole soldering (minus the QWIIC connector).
Although there are many other open source weather stations out there, not many are based around the ESP32 and most are just weather stations without any air quality or soil moisture sensing capabilities. There also seemed to be a huge lack of any designed around sensors supported by ESPHome I also wanted it to be flexible enough for most people’s needs (which is why the variety of connector headers).
Features:
DIY friendly thru-hole design with most pins labelled
Based around a NodeMCU ESP32
Designed to work with ESPHome
5V OR 6.5 - 32V DC input (when populated with TSR12450)
Optional dedicated Voltage regulator for QWIIC/Grove i2c bus for a high number of QWIIC devices
QWIIC compatible (Dedicated i2c Bus-A)
Grove compatible (Dedicated i2c Bus-A)
Mosfet controlled pump or solenoid output
RJ-11 (or 2.54 dupoint) Rain guage and anemometer inputs [Untested]
5 spare GPIO pins (5 support ADC functions, 2 support DAC, 3 support capacitive touch)
Supported Sensors:
Supports a wide variety of temperature and humidity sensors including:
BME280 (Adafruit or other pin-outs)
AM2303 (otherwise known as the DHT22)
SI7021
Support the CCS811 CO2 and VOC (volatile organic compound) sensor
Supports the SDS011 particulate Matter Sensor
Supports the BH1750 Ambient Light Sensor
AMS AS3935 Franklin Lightning Sensor [Connected via SPI]
Any improvements on adding more sensors or improving the EspHome implimentation are of course hugely welcome. I recognize there is a lot more work that could be done in a rev2.0, but i wanted to draw the line somewhere and release something after playing around with it on and off for a few months. I hope it’s useful to some people
Really love the idea of this project. Curious how its been working for you thus far and what kind of enclosure you’ve used this device in. I’ve been searching high and low for something like this, so glad to find something that seemingly just works with HA
This is awesome! Really awesome! It’s not easy to find a board that supports the standard weather station data plus air quality sensors in an open source body!
I’m glad this has gained interest from a few people!
I haven’t unfortunately touched the project for a while, but after having outside for the last 9 months, there’s a few things i would do differently:
Use an externally mounted waterproof Temperature/Humidity sensor. This is since the direct sunlight does heat the enclosure up a bit, i somewhat mitigated this by adding a fan to circulate air into the enclosure
Use a better CO2 sensor. The rather cheap CCS811 hasn’t always produced reliable results that make much sense. I have got a different CO2 sensor on its way to try out instead
Unfortunately i’ve never gotten anything useful from the AMS AS3935 Franklin, i’m not sure it really works in ESPhome (probably requires further investigation)
I would reccomend the SPS30 instead SDS011 for air particle sensors. Nothing explicitly wrong with the SDS011, but due to nature of the sensor it can only be refreshed infrequently and after testing the SPS30 seems like a better quality sensor which provides a lot more data (at double the price though).
My plans for the future:
Add an external UV and Lux sensor box via the dedicated i2c Bus-A with a Qwiic Differential I2C Bus Extender
Background radiation monitoring using a DIY geiger counter kit and the ESPhome Pulse counter sensor
The enclosure i used was a UV stabilized ABS wall mount enclosure (If your in Australia its from altronics - H7931). It’s a bit messy inside (it could be done a lot nicer ) since it’s still a work in progress as i test other sensors and It’s a fair bit bigger then needed since i wanted space for future additions
I’d love to see how you would set up the geiger counter. I’ve followed the uRADmonitor project… and even though they have a kind of DIY kit… it’s still too expensive!
And there are not that many outdoor stations implementing this kind of reading!
Any updates on the RJ-11 rain guage and anemometer inputs which were/are untested?
I live in an apartment, so i have the weather station on a balcony, i’ve never really bothered with buying a rain gauge or anemometer, as i don’t believe they will produce usable data from where its installed. There’s quite a few people who have successfully integrated rain gauges into ESPhome (if you look in the fourms), as they are a pretty simple devices. The anemometer is probably a little trickier.
Wow, the uRAD is expensive. I’ve been considering adding the ‘MightyOhm Geiger Counter kit’ (A lot cheaper), the only downside is that it to get reasonable accurate results from it, I believe you need to calibrate it with radioactive source with an approximately known CPM (Counts per minute). Which does make it a bit harder to implement, haha
) since it’s still a work in progress as i test other sensors and It’s a fair bit bigger then needed since i wanted space for future additions 
