High-level programming languages do a great job of making a programmer’s job easier, but these languages often leave a lot of efficiency on the table as a compromise. While a common thought is to move into a lower-level language like assembly to improve on a program’s speed or memory use, there’s often a lot that can be done at the high level before resorting to such extremes. This, of course, is true of the Arduino platform as well, as [NerdRalph] demonstrates by shrinking the size of the Arduino core itself.

[NerdRalph] had noticed that the “blink” example program actually includes over 1 kB of extraneous code, and that more complicated programs include even more cruft. To combat this issue, he created ArduinoShrink, which seeks to make included libraries more modular and self-contained. It modifies the some of the default registers and counters to use less memory and improve speed, and is also designed to improve interrupt latency as well by changing when the Arduino would otherwise disable interrupts.

While there are some limits to ArduinoShrink, such as needing to know specifics about the pins at compile time, for anyone writing programs for Arduinos that are memory-intensive or need improvements in timing this could be a powerful new tool. If you’d prefer to go in the opposite direction to avoid ever having to learn C or assembly, though, you can always stick with running Python on your embedded devices.

Building your own weather station is a fun project in itself, but building it to be self-sufficient and off-grid adds another set of challenges to the mix. You’ll need a battery and a solar panel to power the station, which means adding at least a regulator and charge controller to your build. If the panel and battery are small, you’ll also need to make some power-saving tweaks to the code as well. (Google Translate from Italian) The tricks that [Danilo Larizza] uses in his build are useful for more than just weather stations though, they’ll be perfect for anyone trying to optimize their off-grid projects for battery and solar panel size.

When it comes to power conservation, the low-hanging fruit is plucked first. [Danilo] set the measurement intervals to as long as possible and put the microcontroller (a NodeMCU) to sleep in between. Removing the power from the sensors when the microcontroller was asleep was another easy step, but the device was still crashing overnight. Then he turned to a hardware solution and added a more efficient battery charger to the setup, which saved even more power. This is all the more impressive because the station communicates via WiFi which is notoriously difficult to run in low-power applications.

Besides the low power optimizations, the weather station itself is interesting for its relative simplicity. It could be built with things most of us have knocking around. Best of all, [Danilo] published the source code on his site, so most of the hard work has been done already. If you’re thinking he seems a little familiar, it’s because we’ve featured some of his projects before, like his cheap WiFi extender antenna and his homemade hybrid tube amplifier.