Road weather station

Corporation Medipo is a road weather station producer. These stations are used mainly for road maintenance indication. Medipo has around one hundred stations installed across the Czech Republic. 

Medipo was seeking a partner for development of the new generation of road weather station. Operating the old stations started to be demanding for both service and repair or even a change started to be more and more costly. One of the reasons was obsolete electronic components. Development of the weather station's new degeneration was therefore inevitable. It was a great opportunity to add new features as well.  

We develop new hardware, embedded software and web app for station servicing within the framework of cooperation. 

Medipo had many demands for HW design, namely modular solution integration, when it is possible to change only one module or several on board instead of changing the whole device. Weather station uses several external probes with analogue output for basic quantities measuring. Probes are being connected to modules for analog measurement. There are five slots for exchangeable analog modules of different types on the main board: temperature, conductivity, voltage and current measurement. It is possible to connect four probes(four-wires) at once to the temperature module, the other modules can use up to eight probes. More complex probes for weather measurement (such as Windsonic, SWS or IRS31) do connect via UTP cable to one of eight serial ports. Every port is controlled by a smaller exchangeable module which enables both full-duplex and half-duplex communication through RS-232, RS-422 and RS-485. This configuration including baudrate can be set in the web interface. There is also one module for twelve digital inputs on the board which can be used for checking current logic level or for pulse counting. 

It is necessary to have a user interface for operating the weather station. One can monitor its status, measured values and control it. This function was fulfilled by a web app which we developed as well. 

The station creates a backup of every dataset to external flash memory and it sends it to a database on the customer's server via Ethernet through MQTT protocol. The weather station configuration and updating is done via web app. 

We carry on cooperating with Medipo on feature extensions based on their customers' needs.

Summary:

• STM32 ARM® Cortex®-M
• Ethernet (2 ports), USB
• 8 serial ports with adjustable baud rate protocol and interfac (RS 232/485/422)
• 5 four/eight-channel module for temperature voltage and conductivit analog probes
• Battery, Battery management system - BMS
• RTC, SD card
• PT100, Digital I/O
• Outputs - Relay, High-side switch
• Capacitive galvanic peripherals separation
• MQTT/JSON server communication
• Web app for remote configuration, updating and monitoring
• TCP port for road probe configuration (IRS31) from PC