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Rain gauge resetter

Ed Sowell

Aug 1, 2016
81
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Aug 1, 2016
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81
Something to do while "sheltering in place". :)
You nailed it!

I've got the leads in place and brought outside the case. See album

The plan for the Arduino controller is to provide 4 buttons: Increment by 1" (25 relay closures), 0.25" (5), and 0.04" (1). The 4th button will clear the total. I think I can do this with the UNO board, a relay board, a button board, and a digital display board. Although I could send the pulses directly, I'm thinking about displaying and saving the total, then sending the total required number of pulses in a subsequent loop. That would allow clearing and starting over if a button was accidentally pushed too many times.

I've peeked at some Ardunio code and it looks pretty much like Java. I've done a lot of Java coding in recent years so the learning curve won't be too steep... I hope.
 

KMoffett

Jan 21, 2009
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Jan 21, 2009
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723
And all this was to not loose the total rain amount when changing the display's batteries. ;) Great learning experience. Amazing what these little micro-controllers can do.Good work Ed!:)
Ken
 

Ed Sowell

Aug 1, 2016
81
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Aug 1, 2016
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81
I enjoyed it... well, most of the time. After I got it working I tweaked something and nothing worked. Reversed the change and it still didn't work. After a couple days I discovered, ironically, that the battery terminals in the collector were corroded!
 

Ed Sowell

Aug 1, 2016
81
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Aug 1, 2016
Messages
81
As it turned out, that wasn't even close to the "end!" It was merely a proof of concept, living entirely on the Arduino UNO board. After that came implementing it on a breadboard with DIP socket for the chip, transferring the Arduino program from the chip on the UNO board to it and testing it, and finally transferring everything over to a Proto board with soldered connections, and packaging.

After testing the Proto board implementation, the hard part began: Putting it all into a project box. Perhaps the biggest problem in this step was coping with wire breakage due to strain on the soldered joint. Following a suggestion on this forum and YouTube examples, I decided to use flexible wires such as come with the Arduino and Elegoo kits, the strands of which are hair thin. Unavoidable jostling while trying to connect the buttons on the box lid to the PCB mounted on the box bottom would invariably break wires at the solder joints. That set me off on finding ways to restrain the wires such that there was zero strain on the soldered joints.

The next problem was due to my decision to make the box lid separable from the box, figuring that this would make design changes and component replacement (i.e., buttons and LEDs) easier to deal with. My solution was to utilize board headers and elegoo connectors. This led to a problem providing sufficient vertical clearance for these connectors. The obvious fix would be getting a bigger box. I elected to not do that because I had so much labor invested in the box, the lid in particular. My solution was to build a "height extender frame" using 1/2" x 0.032" brass strips attached with J-B Wels to 1/2" nylon spacers. That was a tedious process, but it worked.

And, at last, the project is finished.

It's worth noting that I started learning how to use Arduino on June 6 and the proof of concept was working July 30. So, discounting the learning part, it took about 2-3 weeks. The implementation testing, and packaging took 2 months.

I'm prepared to take some criticism for bad design decisions, but I'm glad it works and, for the most part, enjoyed it.

I'm now working on adding photos of all this to the photo album.
 
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