Today’s post is a How-To for a project I recently completed: a temperature-only Weather Underground Personal Weather Station made from an ESP8266, a MAX31820 temperature sensor, and a few miscellaneous parts. The whole project fits inside a 3D printed project box for mounting on an exterior wall that is sheltered from the weather.
The open source project files are in my MAX31820WeatherStation Github repository.
Continue reading Build a Minimal Weather Underground StationIn my previous post, I replaced the electronics of my several-year-old lunar clock design with modern parts. In this post, I’ve replaced the laser cut parts with 3D printed parts, with particular attention to the clip that holds the photo interrupter in place.
Continue reading Lunar Clock: Designing a 3D Printed ClipIn my previous post, the ESP8266 Arduino Sketch was reading 12 temperature sensors. In this post, I describe the progress on the web side of things: the PHP web service that stores temperatures in an SQL database.
I’m really happy with the ESP8266 so far: it reliably connects to a given WiFi access point, and now it’s reliably doing an HTTPS POST of data to my PHP web service.
Continue reading Well Depth Sensing: Temperatures Are In the DatabaseIn my previous post I started the electronics and software for an Arduino Sketch for an ESP8266 WiFi microprocessor and several MAX31820 temperature sensors, that will eventually estimate and upload the level of water in our well water tank.
Since my last post I’ve updated the WellDepthTemperature github repo for the project to read 12 temperature sensors and to do a better job of reporting WiFi errors. That code now successfully identifies and reads the temperature from 12 MAX31820 sensors via a Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing Dev board, all on a breadboard for now.
Continue reading Well Depth Sensing: Measuring the TankI’ve begun another Arduino/ESP8266 project: reporting the level of water in our well tank. This project will involve the ESP8266, MAX31820 temperature sensors, some mechanical work, sending data to a web-based database, and interpreting the temperature data to estimate the well water level.
Continue reading Well Depth Sensing: It BeginsI have to confess that sometimes I need a push to make the right design choice.
It’s been a long time – way too long – since I worked on my Lunar Clock project. In the meantime, Sparkfun has introduced new, inexpensive microcontrollers aimed at Internet-of-Things applications. I knew one of those new microcontrollers would be perfect for the Lunar Clock, but I dragged my feet.
Then one day, a Github user pointed out that one of the boards I was using has been obsoleted.
Continue reading Cost-Reducing the Lunar Clock: IoT Really is HereRecently while working on an open source Arduino library (more about that later) I ran into a challenge: how to make the library’s interrupt-related code compile into the Sketch only if the Sketch writer needed it?
Continue reading How to write an Arduino Library that contains Sketch-conditional code
In my previous post, I covered the mechanical construction of the scale. In this post, I finish assembling the scale, calibrating it, and installing it.
After painting I put feet on the scale so it won’t soak in water spilled on the floor.
Continue reading Dog Water Bowl Scale Part 3: Final Assembly and InstallationNow that my Dog Bed Weight Scale is sending data, I’m going to have a go at a water bowl scale. The idea is that, like the bed, the bowl will periodically send its weight to a cloud. This data should tell me when Pippa drinks, when we refill her bowl, and (maybe) how much she drinks.
The work-in-progress sources on Github, contain the beginnings of the Arduino 101 Sketch, Bill of Materials (Parts List), mechanical design/construction details, and a day-by-day project diary.
Continue reading Dog Water Bowl Scale Part 1: Initial Design WorkIn my previous post I described how to use long break-away headers, and started soldering the circuit together. In this post I finish transferring the scale circuit from the breadboard to a protoboard, and do a quick test mount of the circuit on the plywood scale base.
A reminder: I found that the Load Cell Amplifier was (by design) so sensitive to changes in resistance that just touching the resistors on my solderless breadboard caused large changes in the Amplifier output. So I wanted to solder all the parts down.
Continue reading Dog Weight Scale Part 9: Soldering the V2 Circuit Together
