Continuing this project, in this post I will talk about preparing the Raspberry Pi to become a weather station. I won't go into the details about installing Raspbian onto the SD card or using raspi-config to set the time zone and locale info for your system. You can read my previous Pi posts for those details.
For this project the Raspbian group has released something new - a "lite" version of Raspbian. This is perfect, I can get a clean bare bones Pi right out of the box. Getting wifi setup on the Pi zero is a little more complicated because there is no ethernet port. So it's a multi-step process. First you must use a keyboard and monitor and manually edit the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file to add info for your wifi network. Then power down the Pi, remove the keyboard and monitor, attach the wifi adapter, then power up the Pi and connect via SSH. This is where I ran into my first problem. The RNX-N180UBE I've used in the past and ordered for this project did not work. I quickly discovered Rosewill is now making "version 2" of the adapter which uses a different chipset and Linux does not have drivers for this adapter. After much searching I found this forum post with details on where to download drivers specific to the type or Raspberry Pi and version of Raspbian you are running.
For the BME280 sensor I bought, it can be accessed via SPI or I2C. The Pi supports both, but is one better than the other? From what I can tell, SPI is a faster connection, but I2C is a better designed interface with more control. Since reading this sensor won't involve large amounts of data, I decided to go with I2C. But in order for this to work you need to enable the I2C bus inside of raspi-config.
Another step was to solder in the header to the Pi Zero. This isn't hard, and in fact it's kind of fun. But if your soldering skills are lacking then save yourself the trouble and use a Pi 1, 2, or 3.
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