I thought I would share a recent little side-project that I did at work, putting together a neat and tidy solution to take wind measurements over a three month period for a customer who is interested in installing small wind turbines at some of their rural radio repeater sites.

With a tame sparky on hand to do the fabrication and mounting, I built two almost-identical boxes for the customer, using a MangoES to log data from a Davis Instruments “Vantage Pro 2” weather station. All the equipment in the box is powered by an external DC supply (one site has 48VDC, one has 12VDC) provided by the customer.

The MangoES logs and records data from the weather station at a 30s interval. The data is then pushed to a central Mango server using the Persistent TCP Mango module and a Mikrotik Routerboard as a 3G VPN router provides connectivity via a Yagi antenna high on a mast.

An ‘Ocean Controls’ modbus gateway is used to connect the MangoES unit to the weather station using the built-in RS485 interface.
The MangoES is then connected, using ethernet, to our 3G router – which not only allows it to transmit data, but also allows us to log in (via our VPN) and check up on the units or make adjustments anytime.

The data that we are getting from the units is very detailed. In total the MangoES is recording about 30 weather measurements, and we are even able to measure the 3G signal strength and the DC supply voltage (as recorded by the routerboard) via the MangoES.

After the units were installed, I also set up Mango to send a weekly summary report to myself and the customer via email. The report shows the last week’s worth of weather data on a chart and includes CSV files. It includes some average, mix and max values too. The email report is particularly convenient as it means the customer automatically receives the data and doesn’t have to request it.