I know I'm well overdue for a progress report but I've only just recently finalised boxing everything up completely. The WeatherDuino Pro2 has been operating for months. I've had various interruptions with work, there have been hold-ups due to the ebay snail mail and things also slowed because I made regular decision changes on how I would put it all together. From a very early stage (basically when I ordered the initial boards) I knew that the RX and WD units would essentially sit beside each other, so in the end I decided to just mount them within the same enclosure. Things grew from there and the enclosure now holds the RX unit, the WD unit, as well as the RPi3 (and SSD). Everything worked fine whilst the enclosure was open (with the 2 halves sitting beside each other) and was still fine until the two halves were closed to within about 5mm. Once the final closure happened though, there was a problem with the signal transmission between the RX and WD units. I put this down to interference so tried a small shield made out of a piece of aluminium tube. That did the trick and now everything works fine.
The whole unit is powered by PoE (the 48V version, not the earlier 24V version). That makes things easy to manage at the back end of the enclosure.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/who0cz2xeajoof...w.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nm577pjrj70vks...w.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p8mofgfnhjp2hf...w.jpg?dl=0
As I'd mentioned earlier, rainfall reporting was very important to me, whereas solar radiation and UV weren't really important to me. So I modified the code (with help) to show the level of our home water tanks (we don't have access to town water). The tank level shows in the bottom left hand corner of the WD screen. The tank label and value are colour-coded (green for 75 - 100%, yellow for 50 - 75%, orange for 25 - 50%, and red for 0 - 25%). I travel a bit for work and I'm the only one in the family that keeps an eye on the water levels. So now I can easily check the tank levels from wherever I am in the world and if the tanks get very low, I can organise for a water tanker to bring a load of water and top the tanks up before we run completely dry. The vast majority of the time though, rainfall is sufficient to keep the tanks at an acceptable level.
The LCD screen cycles between the rainfall reporting and the standard display.
You might notice the usb ports and 2 nylon buttons on the rear panel of the enclosure. I've set it up so that you can plug a usb lead into the relevant usb port, push the button, and then the RX or WD unit is ready to have a sketch uploaded to it. That saves opening the box. The switches (a 6PDT for the WD unit and an 8PDT for the RX unit) swap all the power and data connections between standard operation and the usb port, as required. The RX unit switch also opens the jumper (VP1?).
I've also set up a
web site if anyone is interested.
It's been a great learning experience and good fun as well. Thanks to Werk_AG for making it all possible and providing the flexibility and assistance to get us all up and running with such a great project.
