Whether you’re an agriculturalist, a professional meteorologist or a weather hobbyist, building your own weather station can be a really rewarding project. When you’re measuring weather, however, you need some pretty specialized sensors. This kit represents the three core components of weather measurement: wind speed, wind direction and rainfall.

None of the sensors in this kit contain active electronics, instead they use sealed magnetic reed switches and magnets so you’ll need to source a voltage to take any measurements. The positive side of this is that the sensors are easy to interpret:

The rain gauge is a self-emptying bucket-type rain gauge which activates a momentary button closure for each 0.011" of rain that are collected. The anemometer (wind speed meter) encodes the wind speed by simply closing a switch which each rotation. A wind speed of 1.492 MPH produces a switch closure once per second. Finally, the wind vane reports wind direction as a voltage which is produced by the combination of resistors inside the sensor. The vane’s magnet may close two switches at once, allowing up to 16 different positions to be indicated. For more information on how this works, as well as a table of voltage and resistance values for each position, refer to the manual below.