Environmental Sensors

Goals / Status:

    • Develop Arduino applications for measuring and recording environmental data.
    • Currently Ben and Kyle are developing an improved measurement system that stores data to a 32kB EEPROM chip instead of using the 1kB EEPROM on the Arduino.

See the Events Log subpage for data and progress details.

Ideas:

Setup

The sensor package has 3 sensors and one memory storage chip. All the temperature scaling is the same, as described below in ScaleZeroTemp and ScaleDeltaTemp.

    • 1: DS Temp Sensor Pin 3 - has a blue zip tie and blue line in the plots
    • 2: Onboard TMP Temp Sensor - Scaling is Voltage from 0.5-1.0V (0-255). It's attached to input A2. Is a red line in the plots.
    • 3: Light Sensor - Scaling is Voltage from 0-4V (0-255) Resistor is 1000 Ohm
    • 4: DS Temp Sensor Pin 4 - has a piece of duct tape and green line in the plots.

Programming:

    • There are two programs that involve using the Arduino:
      • EEPROMrecord: measures two waterproof temperature sensors, one onboard "air temperature" sensor, and one light sensor. This program was previously called EEPROMwrite.
        • The program uses the variables ScaleZeroTemp = -10C and ScaleDeltaTemp = 0.2 C/count to scale the data. These values give scale from -10C to +41C. Other values can be used to change the range.
      • EEPROMdownload: reads the data from the EEPROM and writes it to the serial monitor. This program was previously called EEPROMread.
        • To save the data it must be copied and pasted to a text file with the extension ".txt"
      • EEPROMclear: clears the memory on the EEPROM by setting all to zero.
    • The program that produces graphs is called "makeplots.py"
      • It can be run in the terminal as "python makeplots.py filename.txt"

The Data is on the file manager under /stars/Research/Environmental/Data

Data Analysis

We can compare the recorded data with historical weather data.