Debugging a Weather station
I’ve had a Pimoroni weather station running in my garden for around two years. It connects to my public wifi and feeds weather readings over MQTT to a Raspberry Pi running Grafana. It has worked well, with the occasional glitch from time to time. Usually, all that’s needed is to power cycle the weather station to get it working again. Recently, power cycling hasn’t been enough; the weather station has remained resolutely dead.
Today, in the middle of Storm Bert, I found some time to take the station down from the 4-metre pole it sits atop to see if I could diagnose its failure.
Literal debugging revealed that the Raspberry Pi Pico W, which samples the sensors and controls the weather station’s communication, had many dead flies stuck to it. The flies seem to be fruit flies of some kind - my knowledge of small black flies is lacking.
I cleaned away the flies with a soft brush and some isopropyl alcohol and checked the connections for corrosion. If I had my hot-air rework station to hand, I’d have replaced the Pico board with a new one, but for now, it’ll do. The board powers up, and the sensors read okay—all except the humidity sensor, which is stuck reading 100%.
I will revisit the board soon. I plan to swap out the humidity sensor, replace the Pico board and apply a good conformal coating layer to protect the boards from the elements and insects.