Project Logs

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• Run for two months

  Makerfabs • 10/22/2021 at 01:28 • 0 comments

  The station has been running for two months that even I forgot it existed.

• The record of measuring

  Makerfabs • 09/02/2021 at 01:09 • 0 comments

  The station has been working for three weeks, and it is still working now. I haven't changed it or rebooted it since it worked, and it never stopped working.

  I will show you the records from the previous week:

• Testing update

  Makerfabs • 07/22/2021 at 09:43 • 0 comments

  The wind station is working now, and it has been working for three days.

  You can check the update here.

  There is an issue that some asked it has no rain sensor. I did not plan to measure the rain, but the station provides two expandable interfaces for creating other sensors like the rain sensor, UV sensor and so on.

• Fall down

  Makerfabs • 06/25/2021 at 10:21 • 0 comments

  It is so sad that the station falling down, I did not even know how it falls down.  it is fortunate that the anemometer and wind transducer are not damaged and still working well.

  What happens since I put the station to the roof?

  I checked the update in the Thinkspeak every two hours since that, and the data is working well. I thought the station would be continued to work that I paid less attention to it. 

  Until the seven days passed, I found the data in the Thinkspeak did not change anymore which reminded me something happened for it. 

  I had checked it once again, and the reason fell dwon was that the station support was unstable. The solar panel holder has been broken, and others are lucky.  

  I had to remake the solar panel holder again and add some metarials to fix the supports stability.

  All is why the data did not update in the thingspeak  in the past few weeks.

• Long Time Running

  Makerfabs • 06/17/2021 at 08:42 • 0 comments

  I reprogramming it for running and monitoring long time. Drive the weather station to wake up every thirty minutes for reading the measures and transmitting the readings to ThingSpeak. For transmitting limit that only int data can be sent, that the reading of temperature and humidity would be turned to 10 times. Plug the SIM card into the board for internet connecting.

  Now, I have put the station on the roof. It was starting to monitor the wind and other readings. 

   You can see the record on the ThingSpeak. 

  The link of ThingSpeak is https://thingspeak.com/channels/1243124

• Assembly a small weather station

  Makerfabs • 06/09/2021 at 09:34 • 0 comments

  For working outdoor whatever clear or rainy, I decided to design a waterproof case that uses the 3D printer making for it. 

  Except it, for station working persistently, I purchase a solar charging panel that it can plug to the board for charging the battery.

  I also had to make a stand to hold the anemometer and wind direction sensor. Like the picture, the small wind station shown.

  After finish assembly.

  Next, I will prepare the program for testing.

• Add wind direction sensor

  Makerfabs • 05/27/2021 at 09:40 • 0 comments

  As your saw in the store, we provide the control board and anemometer that basic of the weather station. To better, I decided to make it to a waterproof, pretty one.

  First, a wind direction sensor is necessary for the weather station, so I purchased one online. And in the process of purchasing, I had met an issue about the kind of wind direction sensor: what kind should I choose, the current output one, voltage output one, and support RS485 one? According to the board and schematic, the one which power by 5V  and output 5V is the best choice.

  In fact, the interface for PM2.5 on board provides the 5V, the GND, one channel ADC and so on, which is also suitable for wind direction interface. As the picture, the sensor outputs 0~5V level and the microcontroller will receive 0~3.3V level. 

  After I received the indicator, I had to remake the interface that the original interface does not work. 

• UV sensor test

  Makerfabs • 05/13/2021 at 08:39 • 0 comments

  I purchased one UV sensor grove in seeed, which is an expansion to measure the intensity of incident ultraviolet(UV) radiation. For creating the value which displays on the OLED of the weather station, I tried to connect the UV sensor grove to the expansion interface of the station. Following the wiki of the UV sensor grove, I have finished the programming. Now, show the result I tried.

• Update PCB

  Makerfabs • 04/22/2021 at 09:50 • 0 comments

  I had prepared a case to install the PCB,  but it was hard because the interfaces are out of the board. To installed the PCB board to a case, I had to modify it.

  In the debugging, I found the display was turned on and had no way to turn it off, it increased the consumption. In order to reduce the consumption and improve the battery life of the weather station, I designed a button to turn off the display screen. At the same time, I deleted the power LED on board. I added a solar panel interface to the board, which can plug the solar panel into it to charge the battery.

• MQTT Test

  Makerfabs • 04/16/2021 at 10:30 • 0 comments

  Since the first debug, the sensors were working fine, and the measurements could be displayed on the LCD. After it, I would test the A9G module working, I had prepared a SIM card for the A9G module to connect the network.

  First, I had to program the board to drive the A9G module running. I spent some time programming for the microcontroller to control the A9G module power on and communicate with it by UART. Used the SERIAL monitor of Arduino IDE to send some AT command, I could get the reply such as ”OK”, that prove the communication between the microcontroller and A9G module is well.

  After it, I began to try transmitting the data to MQTT by the A9G module. Referring the guide of A9G module, I use the serial monitor to send the commands for MQTT one by one that is succeed to transmit the data and I could receive the transmitted data by other MQTT client. But it is worth noting that the GSM antenna must be connected, otherwise the module could not be connected to the network that I wasted a lot of time because of it.  

  Next, I programmed the commands to the code, to drive the board transmitting data to MQTT automatically.

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