For my upcycing project I decided to make a home weather station from some recycled hardwood flooring and some spare electronics I had around the house. To start I used a DHT11 sensor breakout board to sense the current temperature and humidity. These values are read by an arduino pro  mini ($2 from sparkfun’s annual sale a few years ago).

Next, I chose to use two analog voltmeters to function as a display for a 1950’s engineering aesthetic. The output of the voltmeter can be set by varying the duty cycle of the arudino’s pulse width modulation output. I plan to remove the little paper cards behind the needle and replace them with my own temperature and humidity scales. I really wanted to use a wifi module to display the current chance of snow and outdoor temperature, but I didn’t have one on hand and figuring out the technical side of it is likely out of scope of this project.

The next step is cut and stain the recycled hardwood flooring for a rustic looking case. I chose to use wood as the casing material because I really like the texture of old wood, and I’d like to learn some wood working skills as part of the project. So far, I’ve made drawings for the parts in Solidworks. On Wednesday, I’ll be in the IdeaForge makerspace learning how to use the woodworking equipment. If anyone would like to join me you can sign up here.