Replies

Pardon the dark theme but it's too early for bright white.

Already have a temp/humidity sensor. I need to get a second one so I can have one inside the tunnel and one outside. I'll probably get a rain gauge I can connect to as well since I'll be growing outside the tunnel.

Anything can be logged. This is the last 24 hours but it can log up to 30 days or until the allocated space is full, then the older data gets pushed out. The blank spot is when I had the temp/humidity sensor unplugged for a couple of hours yesterday so I could use the 5 vdc reference voltage to test the wind monitor's wind direction signal.

I'm going to try and get Home Assistant home automation software to read data from the system using Modbus protocol. That way I can collect as much data as I want because it would get saved to my hard drive instead of the built in flash memory of the controller. It would be nice to know how much rain I've had for the year. Home Assistant also has much better graphics/graphs. Once connected, Home Assistant would be able to send commands too.

Some really nice dashboards can be created in Home Assistant with data coming from multiple places. Here's someone's weather dashboard with Weather Underground live radar.

Another one that's pulling in the weather forecast. You can add cameras. I could put a video camera in the tunnel and have Tunnel Vision:)

We Want Your Data!

I'll pass on that.

In fact, I don't plan on having the system connect to the internet at all so I won't be able to pull in the weather forecast etc. I have a laptop I can see that on. Some people go overboard with home automation and have their whole house connected to the web so they can control it remotely with their cell phone. I don't need anyone hacking into my system and closing the tunnel when it's 95 degrees etc. The whole point of automation is to have a self running system. When I get my old solar panels hooked up out there, it will be a self powered system too. Bad storms, when I'll want the tunnel sides to close due to high wind, is also when the power is apt to go out.

I access my system from here - http://192.168.1.5/setup.html and you have to be plugged into the network with an Ethernet cable to get to that url. The capability is there to remotely access it but I'm not doing that. Completely closed local system.

And here I go down the rain gauge - tipping bucket rabbit hole.

Measuring rainfall amounts turns out to be fairly straightforward.

https://www.baranidesign.com/faq-articles/2020/2/18/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-choosing-a-rain-gauge

Self-emptying tipping bucket rain gauges are the most popular type of rain gauge"

From another page - The only requirement is that the magnetic switching contact of a rain gauge produces a momentary contact closure when the rain gauge registers its minimum water amount. This type of rain gauge electrical contact is called a “Normally Open” (NO) contact and is found on 90% of rain gauges on the market today.

Concept: Bucket fills up to the point where the weight of the water and design of the 'tipping bucket' tips it over and dumps the water. When it tips, it closes the Normally Open contact for a 'moment'(momentary contact aka push button). Each bucket full and subsequent tip is a certain amount of water that can be translated to rain amount in inches.

I haven't found that inches per bucket tip figure yet but it will depend on the make and model of the bucket. Say it's 0.1 inches. 10 tips would close the contacts 10 times and would be an inch of rain.

The system simply needs a counter which is easy because digital inputs can be a counter already.

Now I just need a tipping bucket rain gauge for the counter to count.

Here's where I'm running into a limitation in the controller software. I can create one counter for each digital input and I can set it to reset at a certain count but that's it. It would be nice to have multiple counters for a single digital input and have the counts reset at different time intervals. That way I could see rain accumulation for this week or this month, year etc.

I'm sure it can be done but it will likely have to be done by writing scripts in the BASIC programming language.

Easy peasy NOT(or simply contact the company and say "Can you give me a script to do this?")

Until I can write or get a script, I can record the monthly amounts in a spreadsheet and reset the counter every year.(once I get a tipping bucket rain gauge)