Meshtastic Weather Station

Some build details about my solar powered weather station that is running as a Meshtastic sensor node providing temperature, humidity and pressure to my local mesh and further into Home Assistant via MQTT.

Starting from an old wooden candle light. Old slats removed and replaced by L-shape wooden slats.

Powered by an 7W Sunyima solar panel via CN3791 based MPPT.

Linx ANT-868-ID-1000-SMA 868 MHz antenna.

Electronics box inside. The BME280 environmental sensor is exposed on the bottom. The box hold the Raspberry Pico board in combination with a Waveshare LoRa module.

Battery and MPPT are located in the upper compartment.

Two parallel KeepPower 26650 cells with 5500mAh each providing power to the station when the sun is gone. An INA219 sensor provides current measurements and and LiIon protection board for battery safety.

The Meshtastic node is based on a Raspberry Pico board with Waveshare LoRa module that is running the latest Meshtastic firmware with pico-slowclock variant. The slow clock firmware reduces the overall current consumption to an average of ~12mA@4.1V by reducing the Pico's core frequency to 18MHz. A CN3791 based MPPT connects the solar panel to the battery and keeps the charge.

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