My experience updating Data Logger Firmware in Makueni County

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Published: October 11, 2018

The DWA Estate in Kibwezi East sub-county , Makueni county is located roughly about 200 KM from the capital. If one is keen enough, some section of the sisal farm can be seen when travelling on the Nairobi – Mombasa highway, and even from this it is not easy to imagine that the Estate covers an area of 8,990 ha.

The Estate offices are not easy to find the first time, but thankfully I received invaluable help from the locals, and finding my way there did not prove to be a challenge once I arrived at Kibwezi town. Besides the production of Sisal fibre which the Estate boasts, the Estate is also home to one of TAHMO’s third generation AWS. I contacted my host Mr. Franklin Kivindyo beforehand, who assured me I would be guided and taken to the weather station, and true to his word, after my arrival at the Estate’s offices at a quarter past noon on the Wednesday of 10/03/2018 and the horticulture section (in which the station is housed) was notified, barely 10 minutes had passed before an Estate driver drove me to the section.

I had formed the strict intention to perform the Data Logger firmware update on this station, which runs on version 1.09.10 of the firmware, armed with Zentra Utility, the newest version of the firmware, and manuals TAHMO’s (Kenya) field engineer Mr. Victor Omoit had been kind enough to provide.

I really thought that I would have to dismount the data logger from the rest of the station to perform the update, but Victor assured me on phone that this would be unnecessary. I started Zentra Utility and connected the data logger. The sensors were all working as expected. Shortly afterwards, Zentra Utility identified a new firware version ready to be installed and updated, and I immediately began the installation process. Unfortunately, the firmware update was not successful on the first trial.

The firmware update was not successful after subsequent trials, and even a manual update (seeing as I already had the firmware on my laptop) proved unsuccessful too: the update attempts kept on returning a FOTA error. After much consultation with Victor, we agreed that I should quit the update attempts at around 3 PM.

It would seem that my trip to DWA Estate was not fruitful, and it seemed that way even to me at first. On the contrary, in hindsight, my trip was very educational. As I’m working on developing a model for the quality control for the observed precipitation values, I believe my exposure to an actual station the data logger will provide me with useful insights as to how the data is observed and collected.

Lest I forget (seeing as I did while I was there), DWA Estate have another weather station installed, besides TAHMO’s. However, my preoccupation with updating the firmware made me forget about it; I remembered I should have obtained information about it afterwards.