Friday, February 1, 2013

Outdoor Temperature Part 3

Part 1 is here <link>, part 2 is here <link>

I've been asked several times now how I mounted the temperature sensor to the XBee, and I didn't explain very well because I was too lazy to take a picture.  See, once I put it in a Stevenson Screen and mounted it on a fence post, it isn't as easy to get to as a lazy person like me would like.

Well, I got asked again and decided to bite the bullet and go open it up for a picture:

Simple huh?  One end of the sensor is hooked to 5V from the wall wart, the other end is to ground and the sensor output is connected to two 10K resistors in series to ground.  I take the center of the the two resistors to an XBee analog pin for transmission to my House Controller.  Notice the sophisticated nylon tie to mount the XBee?  Remember, this is all inside an open air enclosure that is screened on the inside to keep the darn birds from building nests inside.  It also keeps out rodents and bats (yes, I know bats are rodents).

The board is an XBee breakout board that has a 3.3V regulator on it to power the XBee, so I have access to both 5V and 3V to power whatever I need.  I've mentioned the wall wart several times on this blog, so look around a bit if you're curious.

There, now I can just point to a picture when people ask how I did it.

2 comments:

  1. Looks like a perfect candidate for the smaller/lower power/cheaper Moteino wireless node (lowpowerlab.com). That's unless you're head-over-heels invested in XBee infrastructure...

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  2. It's not so much the investment in infrastructure, I could always run parallel networks for different purpose devices. It's more the store forward, ack, automatic retries, you know, network topology items. My place covers an acre and I have plans for nodes at each corner and the XBee software handles moving messages around as necessary to complete connections. There are other folk that are leveraging this capability as well for large greenhouses, garden monitors, that kind of thing.

    I really like your device. It's plenty small and seems to be well thought out. I CAN think of several uses for it that don't require a sophisticated network. Plus, it's a nice little computer in it own right. Good job.

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