Have you considered using pcb and gschem for the electronics? There's a supportive list and good ways to get library schematic symbols and pcb footprints besides making your own.
I have thought about that but to my knowledge it doesn't have any 3D functionally as KiCAD does. I'm not sure how full fledged the 3D aspect of KiCAD is as it is very useful when design the 3D CAD models as you can work out clearances for the PCB easily.
great full. --> grateful.
Just for reference I'm dyslexic so unfortunately there will be others, I'll do my best to make my email understandable but the occasional one will slip though.
Have you done much market research on the commercial competition? There are plenty of weather stations proven and working, so all you can hope for is a cost reduction, and it might be tough to beat standard prices as they've been evolving for so long. But, if you think prices are easy to beat, that's a good reason for open hardware.
This isn't a commercial venture, it's just to see if all the tools can be used together and produce something and I'm doing it for fun.
The functions of a weather station barely make a microcontroller breathe hard, so I immediately think, "What else could you add in the microcontroller part to make a weather station better?", and it strikes me you should use a higher level language than C for the code, and so users can adapt their stations -- use them as development platforms. Then you have a wider market -- scientists start to be interested, tinkerers of course, and developers of instrumentation setups. Otherwise your market is just other EE/CS types, (if they like C).
That interesting, I could see about specifying a very powerful chip so I could add bindings for other languages but that's out of my depth I'm not sure if that could be done.
One of my far fetched add-ons to this project was to make them wireless and create a mesh network so multiple units could be put on a site and give weather profiles to be used in micro weather forecasting.
What I like is python-on-a-chip, running on micros like STM32 or MC13224v. See http://www.redwirellc.com/store/node/1 http://mc1322x.devl.org/ http://www.futurlec.com/ET-STM32_Stamp.shtml
The STM32 stamp board can run elua, a version of lua:
That's another high level language that some say is good for rapid development. I've not tried it yet, but it looks like time.
I'll have a look at those when I specify everything up but initial idea is to keep it fairly simple and use my existing knowledge.
Chris W