Solar-powered weather and air quality monitoring system based on the IoT platforms

The weather and air quality monitoring system provides valuable information to support many activities. This paper presents the development and implementation of the weather and air quality monitoring system based on the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. The developed system adopts the low-cost weather and gas sensor and the small, powerful Arduino Nano 33 IoT microcontroller. Furthermore, the solar panel and battery system are used as the energy resources for the developed monitoring system. Two popular IoT platforms, namely the ThingSpeak and Blynk, are employed as the IoT cloud servers, where the ThingSpeak is mainly used for saving, displaying, and analyzing historical data, while the Blynk is primarily used for online monitoring based on the mobile application. The experimental results show that the electronics and sensors modules consume the power of 1.3 Watt, and the IoT module requires a data transmission size of 429 KB per transmission. The preliminary evaluation shows that by operating the system at a time interval of 180 minutes, it achieves a ratio of charging time to discharging time of 0.33, which offers a promising result for a self-powered and green energy system.