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

Weather Station Project #10 - Starting Extra Sensors

Ok, now that the Vantage Vue is putting out good data, the next portion of the project is to set up the next three sensors.  The three sensors will be Solar Radiation, UV Index, and Pollen Count.  I'm thinking the following:

(1) Processor Setup

• Use Arduino Mega to interface to the sensors (more IO lines, a little more capable system than the Uno)
• Use Prototyping board on top of Mega for interface to the sensors

(2) Solar Radiation

• Solar Radiation sensor based on use of TSL2561 Lux Sensor from Adafruit (TSL2561)
• Solar Radiation sensor will need to be put behind a white painted glass surface
• Solar Radiation sensor uses I2C bus, read by Mega

(3) UV Index

• UV Index sensor based on use of SI1145 UV Sensor from Adafruit (SI1145)
• UV Index sensor will need to be put behind a clear glass pane, plastic pane will inhibit the UV from passing to the sensor
• UV Index sensor uses I2C bus, read by Mega

(4) Pollen Count

• Pollen Count sensor based on use of SCM GP2Y1010AU0 bought from Happy Store (B00GET4KR0)
• Pollen Count sensor actually counts density of particles greater than 2.5 um
• Pollen Count sensor puts out a voltage which will need to be read by Mega

(5) Connection to Weather Station RPi

• Connection to Weather Station RPi  done through an Addicore nRF24L01 2.4GHz wireless transceiver (B00E594ZX0), one on the Mega and one on the Weather Station RPi
• Will require python script on Weather Station RPi to read values from Addicore transceiver
• Will require code on Mega to transmit all three values at a regular interval

(6) Housing for Sensors

• Housing for Sensors should be based off of Solar Radiation shield (Radiation-Shielding-7714)
• Power comes up through the bottom of the shield
• Need two holes cut into the top; one for white painted glass for solar radiation and one for glass for UV index

Weather Station Project #9 - Building a Weather and General Info Display

I thought  that I might take some time and figure out a weather display for my PWS.  I am intending on using another RPi, different from the one running the PWS to do the interface to an old monitor that I have lying around.  I intend on have some sort of touch pad and people sensor attached to the RPi and mounted on the top of the monitor; also holding the RPi on the back of the monitor.  The idea is to be able to change what is being displayed, or send it into a rotation mode, by tapping on the touch pads, and have an IR sensor determine when someone walks into the room.  So the requirements look like the following:

(1) Raspberry Pi displaying output from the PWS / Weather Underground / Google Calendar / NOAA radar map / ABC News feed / Fox News feed, etc.

(2) a touch pad connected to the Raspberry Pi which is able to sense a touch and cause the display to change to the desired feed, or conversely to change to an auto rotating display.  The touch pad should also be able to turn the display off (sleep mode).

(3) an IR sensor connected to the Raspberry Pi which will detect when someone enters the room and turn the display on (from sleep mode), it should be able to be set to go into sleep mode automatically after a certain amount of time in which there is no movement in the room.

(4) the Raspberry Pi should be able to be connected to the wi-fi system via a usb adapter and have only a power connection to get it running.

Update: this is a shot of a Raspberry Pi B+, in a case, attached to the back of a Acer touch screen monitor via a little lexan Vesa mount that I picked up at Micro Center for cheap.  I am in the process of setting it up to do the afore mentioned items.  I just picked up the Acer Touch Screen Monitor from Micro Center for about $250.  It's a 21.5 inch screen area with two HDMI ports.  It has it's issues, and no I haven't tried out the touch screen interface on the RPi yet, but seems to be near enough to what I want to use.  Also, it doubles as the display for my Mac Mini.  I got it for a potential portable Weather Display.  BTW, the long adapter is for a Logitech keyboard; small adapter plus an extension.

Multiple Embedded Computer Connections

So now that I have the ability to connect multiple RPis to my network in a separate VLAN, I am trying to figure out how to provide screen images and keyboard/mouse connections to them and also to connect other devices in my network.  There are a number of issues that I am trying to resolve at this point.

1. I have an almost full managed switch all to myself after moving the Mac Mini to a different managed switch.  I need to make use of this "tail end" switch to the max.
2. I have 5 different Raspberry Pis that I will need to connect to at any one time plus a number of other devices, including media equipment.  This provides a power and networking issue that needs to be resolved.

Setting up Shorewall and VLANs on the 1-Port Router

In putting together a 1-Port router, it seems that I have kind of lost a purpose here.  What I would like to do is have the router allow just the Mac Mini to access 3 other VLANs than what it is connected to.  In addition, I don't want anything from the Pers VLAN with the exception of the Mac Mini to be able to connect to these three VLANs.  I don't want any cross-talk between the VLANs.  The diagram of what I want to do is shown below.



 In order to accomplish this task I am turning to an old friend in the firewall world, Shorewall (http://www.shorewall.net/).  So I want to load Shorewall onto my 1-port router, add the additional VLANs, and add Webmin to manage the Shorewall setup and other things on this platform.  Installing Shorewall and Webmin is pretty easy:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install shorewall
sudo apt-get install -y perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl apt-show-versions python
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.690_all.deb
sudo dpkg --install webmin_1.690_all.deb