Working with a GuertDino

Ok, I now have a GertDuino in hand. I just happened to see it when I was in Micro Center. right now, I am planning on using it with the optical parts and the pollen parts of the weather station. It's Black Friday weekend and I think I will have some time to work on this. I have been facing a problem with how to transport the information from the sensors to my home network without having a physical connection, or just one cable. I have thought about using PoE injector/extractor pairs but that doesn't seem to be the correct way to do the job. The GertDuino might be a way that I can offload the sensor sampling from a RPi - not that I need to do such a thing; only that it is a neat use of technology to have a cross-platform sensor rig. Oh well, maybe I might use it for something else entirely. But a neat idea anyway.




-- LW

Weather Station Project #11 - Working on Code for Other Sensors

I had some time this weekend to work on the other sensors that I will be using in the weather station.  I decided to go ahead and test out the TSL2561, the SI1145, and the Sharp  Dust Sensor.  The Arduino breadboard that I am using for the other sensors in the test suite is the Parallax Board of Education.  This breadboard plugs right into the Arduino Uno (actually on top of an Ethernet shield and then into the Uno) and provides breakout of the analog and digital lines for prototyping as well as allowing other shields to be added to the mix.  I wanted to get the software working first followed by putting the sensors on a Arduino prototyping shield.  My thought was to use the Arduino to do the sensor interface and push a serial output down the USB line to a Raspberry Pi.  Alternatively, I have a couple of Wireless Transciever modules to do the same thing.  Haven't thought that far ahead yet.  The whole breadboarded setup is shown in the image below:




The visual sensors, the TSL2561 and the SI1145, are both cantilevered over the edge of the breadboard so that I can get to the pins below for the jumper wires.




The Dust Sensor in this photo is simply sitting on top of the Board of Education since there are no electrical conductive parts on the bottom.  I simply plugged the wires into their respective locations according to prototype setups that I found online.



The wiring setup for the Sharp Dust Sensor is according to what is recorded at standalone-sharp-dust-sensor.  The only difference is that I used A3 for the analog instead of A6 which is not available on the UNO.  The connections for the SI1145 is according to the instructions found at Adafruit-si1145-breakout-board-uv-ir-visible-sensor.  The connections for the TSL2561 is according to instructions found at Adafruit - TSL2561 Luminosity Sensor. Since the I2C addresses are different between the two visual sensors, I connected the SDA and SCL connections in parallel.  The two visual sensors make use of the Adafruit sensor library.

I tested each of the sensors independently from one another using test programs that were provided.  Now I am in the process of combining the test program pieces from each of the sensors into the same sketch.  After that, I will run a test to gather data over the period of a couple of days to try and compare to known values from other weather stations.  Once that is accomplished, I will endeavor to solder the sensors into the Arduino shield and place the whole lot into the specified fin enclosure.

-- LW