The WindNerd Core is a full magnetic sensor board designed to fit inside the WindNerd 3D-printed-anemometer.
It is available as a kit, which includes the board and essential parts like magnets and bearings.
You can use it as a dedicated wind sensor module for your weather station, or as an Arduino compatible development board that can, for example:
- Control peripherals such as a radio modem to send data remotely
- Drive LEDs that blink according to wind speed and direction
- Interface with other sensors (e.g., temperature, humidity, pressure)
For development, an ST-Link V2 (or compatible) dongle is recommended. However, alternative firmwares can also be uploaded via a serial bootloader.
The board is shipped with factory firmware that outputs instant wind values and averaged wind values over a serial connection.
The average power consumption is only 1.5mA (3.3V or 5V).
It can be connected to a computer using a USB-serial-TTL adapter or to any MCU board that provides a UART serial interface.
The baudrate is 9600bps 8N1. This configuration allows fairly long wiring, e.g. to reach the top of a pole.
Two types of messages are provided, the default speed unit is km/h and values are averaged for the last 10 minutes:
Instant wind (every 3 Sec)
WNI,<speed>,<direction 0-359>
ex: WNI,10.4,149
Average wind report (every minute)
WNA,<speed avg>,<direction avg 0-359>,<min speed>,<max speed>
ex: WNA,12.2,93,0,21.4
The factory firmware is based on an Arduino example sketch that can be easily tweaked to your own needs.
How to read serial data from another device
This repository provides an Arduino library that implements a driver for the magnetic sensors and computes wind speed and direction, exposing the values through a simple API.