Draining and charging One of the critical points I want to test before deploying the station outside is how it behaves if it runs out of power. Think of dark December days with snow on the solar panel. So, I implemented a “drain the battery” routine, which turns on the LED to full brightness and […]
Outdoor solar powered weather station – part 3
I have a bug! Four days ago the microcontroller got stuck. The LED was on, but it was no longer transmitting. So I hit reset and continued testing. One of the things I added was a watchdog trigger. The CubeCell board has a build in watchdog – and the only thing you need to do […]
Outdoor solar powered weather station – part 2
Not too much progress but I said I rather blog more often this time instead of just reporting the result at the end. I am usually working about between 30 minutes to an hour in the evening on this project, a bit more during the weekend. So it is slow steps. Software When I built […]
Outdoor solar powered weather station – part 1
I built this type of weather station before. But unlike the last times, when I blogged only after I completed it, this time I will blog during building it. I do not spend too much time on this. Still working from home I often lack the energy going back to my desk in the evening […]
Building an Anemometer – Part 2
In this part I write about the microcontroller I am using and the code. Recently the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a completely new designed microcontroller which can be programmed with MicroPython. Named the RP2040, it is somewhat limited as it does not have Wifi or any other means of wireless communication on board, but it […]
Building an Anemometer – Part 1
This is my most complex 3D printed project so far. The idea: I have now quite a number of weather sensors. I measure temperature with solar-powered sensors which transmit their data using LoRaWan at two locations now. I measure if it rains (qualitative measurement only). But I do not measure wind yet. So to keep […]
Working from home – 12 months in
It was in March 2020 when Corona got serious and all employees where I work were ordered to work from home when ever possible. I was just coming back from a vacation (vacation, travelling, …, remember?) and had to adjust quickly to the new situation. Even when the situation was a bit better during the […]
Making stuff: CO2 monitor
If you have read my blog and my postings on Facebook for a while you know that one of my hobbies is to play around with microcontrollers. I built environmental sensors for my house and also two solar powered weather stations for outside. One of my inhouse sensors is already monitoring fine dust levels and […]
Environmental Sensors: Remote
Last week my garden sensors gave up – the wooden birds house I used to contain them was simply rotten so I needed a new one. For outside housing of sensors these cheap wooden birds houses are great – no plastic but wood, cheap, and easy to work with. The local home supply store only […]
Environmental Sensors: Lightning
You perhaps know that one of my hobbies is playing around with microcontrollers and sensors. For quite a while now I have deployed ESP8266 based sensor nodes inside and outside of my house. Currently they mainly gather temperature, moisture levels, air pressure and light levels, using BME280 and similar sensors. A while ago I discovered […]