|
|
|
Arduino in the Weathertron
Sunday, March 8 2020
Today was predicted to be warm, but it was still cold this morning when I went to take the dogs for a walk. I didn't give them a great walk, only making it about 2/3 down the Farm Road before scaling the escarpment to its west and walking home along the top of that.
At some point I realized my "Weathertron" weather station wasn't successfully measuring wind speed. Fortunately, it's an easy device to remove from the greenhouse for maintenance. While I was fixing it, I also fixed a few bugs in its Arduino's firmware that were doing things like storing values in bytes that should've been in longs or attempting to do things in the I2C request handler that should've been done in the I2C receive handler. Ideally, I'd be able to change the Arduino's firmware directly from the Raspberry Pi Zero, but that would require running an Arduino IDE from the command line, something I've never actually done and can't be bothered to learn how to do for something so trivial. The Arduino in the Weathertron is not intended to be a particularly flexible piece of hardware; ideally I'd work out all the bugs and then never change it again.
After days of being in the house, I'd developed a mild case of cabin fever, so I drove out to the Home Depot, mostly to buy hydronic fluid and some bolts to maybe improved the attachment hardware for the Weathertron. While there, I didn't see anyone wearing surgical masks (though on Friday I had seen someone wearing one at the bus stop in front of the Ghettoford in Uptown).
By late afternoon, it was about as warm outside as it was inside. Even Charles the Cat was outdoors enjoying the sunshine. After getting my Weathertron the way I wanted it (I even had it storing data in an on-Raspberry-Pi MySQL database), I processed a heavy backpack of very dry oak I'd salvaged yesterday across the Farm Road. Given all the passive solar energy coming through our windows and how accustomed we've become to cold, we don't actually burn much wood at this time of year.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200308 feedback
previous | next |
