Adafruit Feather Weather Station.txt

This is a fun little project you can probably complete in a single weekend (after all the parts arrive)!
All parts were purchased from either Adafruit, AliExpress, or Amazon, and I went with the cheapest parts available. 
Your milage may vary, but if you want very reliable - just stick with all Adafruit parts!

Base:
  Adafruit has some neat chips under the "Feather" label.
  All of these parts should work with any Feather for the most part, with the exception of the SD Card Reader.
  
  For my "mobile" station design I used an Adafruit Feather Huzzah! 
  For the "base" stations, I used the LoRA Feathers

For the sensors:
  My goal was to use as few pins as possible, to that end, I primarily used I2C and Dallas 1-Wire Sensors
  This should make all these parts compatilble with Arduinos, ESP8266 modules, Particles, etc as long as its 3.3v logic.
  
  VEML6070 - It says it can calculate UV Index, but I haven't figured out how, or how to calculate it manually (what unit does it use???)
  SI1145 - Has two sensors, "visible" and "uv", but its apparently relatively unreliable and documentation very sparse
  
  The soil moisture sensor specs I'll be uploading. 
  
  
  
 As for the rest, I'll upload more as I find all the links for the parts...
 Total is ~$200, which is ~$100 cheaper than the cheapest Davis weather station and has more sensors.
 
Problem Notes:
  * Pullup Resistors: i2c is a bit problematic, all the breakout boards have pullup resistors on them when you should only have one for all of them. Good option is to simply remove the pullups on all but the first i2c chip but this makes things a bit weird since its all sufrace mount. (Going to look into getting PCBs of these chips)
  * LED Indicators: Breakouts have all separate  power indicator LEDs which just wastes power, removing these appears to have had no ill effects but increased power efficency a bit! 
  * i2c Addresses & Calibration: If you're ordering outside of Adafruit or Sparkfun some chips have preset i2c addresses which don't match to the libraries used - I used a Raspberry Pi to identify i2c addresses and made things a lot easier. Also some of these chips require some calibration if you're ordering from bulk - luckly they're pretty reliable once calibrated. 
  * Power: In an effort to make things more efficient, the external ADS1115 has a nifty feature called "single read" which allows us to power up and read data from analog, and then drop down again (thus using less power), however, direct power to the analog components is still there! I used a pin to control power via a transistor to the analog 3v power (people also recommend handling ground as well). Looking for some input on this to make more power efficent solutions, but removing power to unused components did help. i2c chips selected most have automatic "idle" where they use tiny amount of power, so not too worried abou these.
  * WiFi / ESP8266 / LoRA - If you are using LoRA radios, the radio can remain off until transmit using approxmately 80mah until power up and transmit at around 200mah for a short duration. If you're on ESP8266 - see this http://bbs.espressif.com/viewtopic.php?t=133. Leaving the radio off will use around 80mah as well, but turning it on will peak the power for short periods, we can select different packet sizes and speeds (sorta)! 

sensors.csv