The BMP085 is a I2C Barometric Pressure/Temperature sensor available from both Sparkfun and eBay.  The Sparkfun breakout board is very expensive, about $20, but they have excellent instructions on how to use it.  You can get the BMP085 chip on eBay for about $4 and the breakout board for about $6 for 3, but you have to be able to solder SMD to use them.

BMP085 breakout board soldered into my weather station interface board

Sparkfun has an excellent tutorial whose code I pretty much just used verbatim in my application. The only thing I changed were the bmp085Read and bmp085ReadInt functions, since as written, they will retry forever for the bmp085 to respond.  Since my device is outside, and attached to an I2C bus that is about 2.5 M long (for the Max44009 light sensor), sometimes I get a failure in reading the responses from the BMP085.  I just changed the lines that read

  while(!Wire.available())
    ;

To read:

  int n=0;
  for(n=0;n<25;n++)
  {
    if(Wire.available())
      break;

    delay(100);
  }

  if (n==25)
  {
    return 0;
  }

This way if my BMP085 malfunctions, the whole system doesn’t hang.  The other code adjustment was to put in the altitude compensation in the calculations:

#define ALT 142.0

float getPressure()
{
  long pa=bmp085GetPressure(bmp085ReadUP());

  float press=((float)pa/pow((1-ALT/44330),5.255))/100.0;
  return press;
}

Before I put in the compensation for altitude, my pressure was always too low.  Once I compensated for my 142 M altitude, the results from this device are spot on.  I’m very happy with the accuracy of this chip.

The other trick to using this device is the fact that it is a 3.3V device, and you can’t simply connect it up to a 5V I2C Arduino connection and hope for it to have a long life.  This document gives a very detailed discussion on setting up a bi-directional voltage level translator for the I2C bus.  The highlighted part of the schematic below shows the voltage level translator (the transistors are a couple of SN7000 MOSFETs):

Bi-Directional voltage translator for the I2C bus.