One of the students in my IoT Computer Club (here in the UK) is working on a personal project to design and build a solar-powered weather station (that will be located in one of the school's gardens) to monitor and report air temperature, humidity and pressure.
(Note: The above bullet-points will become hyperlinks as and when the documentation is written.)
So far the student has completed stages 1, 2, 3 and 6 and is working on stages 4 and 5.
I've explained the importance of documenting the work, but like a lot of people... 'writing code and getting something to work is more fun than writing it up'.
Any feedback or encouragement anyone could offer would be appreciated and would probably encourage the student to 'put pen to paper' or whatever the equivalent saying is for an iPad.
Sounds Good Dave - i just finished reading an interesting write up someone did using the Sparkfun Thing - key as it has an integrated LiPo battery connector and charing circuitry
I then found another write up that may be useable as it demonstrates appropriate components and how to document a project such as this
Thanks for the response.
We are using a Wemos D1 Mini Pro (like an ordinary Wemos except you can fit an external anntena for better WiFi range) flashed with ESP Easy firmware and powered from a 2500mAh Li-Ion battery.
Wemos actually have a LiPo daughter board. I have one but I've never got round to trying it yet as all of my sensor platforms so far have been mains powered via USB adaptors.
Some random ideas for encouragement:
Get them to sign up to one of the maker sites and to use that to document their progress - getting feedback and encouragement from the whole world can be rather motivating! Parental approval required of course.
Get them to break down the documentation like the project and get it on the wall at school where others can see it.
Do a few of the boring bits for them and let them just do diagrams.
Try to get them using JSDoc when writing code or at least to start with comments outlining the structure before actually coding.
Some kind of reward system for producing documentation? Maybe even get parents to agree to provide some rewards?
Bullet point 6 (in my orginal posting at the top of this thread) has been updated to show some images of the panels that have been designed using Autodesk Fusion-360.
Although I have yet to find this myself, there has been a lot of talk ever since the little tp4056 boards (just to be clear I am referring to the actual power io boards not the chips themselves) started being produced, about "fake" ones, or units that claim to have voltage/current regulation built in which actually don't.
As the tp4056 is designed for use with Li-Ion batteries it's always best to get them from a reputable supplier, and make sure they come with the DW01 battery protection IC built on the board.
Hi Bob,
That's a very good point you made.
The board mentioned and illustrated in Topic-1 or Stage-1 has indeed got this battery protection device.
The board used in this project has three chips.
The large one on the left-hand-side is the Li-Ion charging controller, the one at bottom-right is a dual channel N-MOSFET and the one at top-right is the DW01V (battery protecion IC).
For the last three weeks we have been doing an experiment to see how long the Li-Ion battery will power the Wemos. We started off with a 'deepsleep' time of 20-mins for the first week, then 15-mins and now it's been ticking along at 10-minute intervals for nearly a week.
All the hardware is housed in a cardboard box (as we won't have access to the school's laser cutting machine to make Stage-6 until September) so the project is only put outside when the weather is dry.
We do however keep the project running (24 * 7) even if it is indoors.
Always fun to do this type of experimentation. Have you run it with radio only switched off? I forget which mode that is now, but seem to recall significant power savings could also be made in this mode, while still allowing sensor input. Then, every x period, fire up the wifi and send your data packets, back to Node Red naturally.
Yes - that's what we have been doing. Putting the Wemos D1 Mini into 'deepsleep' for a long period of time.
We measured the current the Wemos takes during normal operation to be 170mA and when it goes into 'deepsleep' it goes down to 0.2mA. Quite a saving.
We are using ESP Easy as the firmware and have written some 'rules' so when the Wemos wakes up it takes some measurements and send the data via MQTT to Node-RED and optionally also send the information to ThingSpeak.
Stage-2 has been documented.
There is a link at the top of this thread.
I have just come across your post and found it very interesting.
I myself have tinkered with all sorts of sensors, micro controllers for while now and more recently Node-Red, InfluxDB and Grafana.
This is a great project that can be expanded as I have found myself, adding other sensors, databases and graphing and with the amount of cheap sensors, it won't cost a fortune.
There is so much to learn with this, electronics, programming, remote access, data capturing and data bases, environment, IOT, etc, this list goes on.
Would the data from the weather station be available to the public. I noticed you mentioned Thingspeak which I am familiar with but I don't know BeeBotte.
Is this just one student, a group or whole class?
By the way, what is that brown lump thing in the box behind the breadboard?
