Step-by-Step: Building an IoT Weather Station for Science Fairs

Environmental monitoring is one of the highest-scoring and most socially impactful themes in national science fairs like IRIS and CBSE Science Exhibition. ### System Architecture: - **Microcontroller**: ESP8266 or ESP32 NodeMCU - **Sensors**: DHT22 (Temp/Humidity), BMP280 (Pressure), MQ-135 (Air Quality), Rain Sensor - **Power**: 6V 2W Solar Panel with TP4056 charge management module and 18650 Li-ion battery - **Cloud Dashboard**: Real-time telemetry via MQTT to ThingSpeak or Grafana Students not only learn electronics soldering and firmware programming in C++, but also gain hands-on experience in meteorological data analysis and climate trends in their local school campus.