Wireless Weather Sensor Prototype
2016-07-20 21:17 - Making
Here's a picture of the just completed first prototype for my wireless weather sensor. I'm upgrading the temperature sensor design because I didn't do a great job with it. I got it to the point that it's barely functional, learned some things, and so now it's time for round two.
I've still got the DS75 temperature sensor I started with. It's at the top middle of the picture, the tiny chip on the larger green board. Moving slightly counterclockwise, behind a forest of wires, is a black box: that's an AM2320 sensor which does both temperature and humidity. Continuing clockwise from there on a purple breakout board is a BMP280 barometric pressure sensor, which also does temperature to boot.
All three of these chips speak the same I2C communication protocol, so it's just the two orange wires from the big board at the bottom (a clone NodeMCU) that connects to all of them, as I2C is a shared bus. Now that I've got it working, I know for certain that I understand all three chips and how to wire them up. And get data out:
Reading at 874742: AMT=80.06; AMH=49.00; BMT=82.83; BMP=101974.61; DST=81.05
They only mostly agree about the temperature, with a drift of a couple degrees between them. In practice I'll probably take the average (mean) of all three readings. I've got plans for a PCB to put all this on. It will be bigger than the previous one, and more carefully designed, with internal slots to make sure the heat from the WiFi/controller chip doesn't reach out to foul the temperature sensors' readings, and a real USB connector (just for power) rather than trying to use the PCB itself for that when it's too thin to do that job well.
