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The Changing Weather

The weather station is mounted outside, but the work is still not over.  I’m having issues maintaining power to the station.  I am using an external battery with a solar cell on it to charge it.  Unfortunately, the weather station pulls more power than the solar panel supplies to the battery.  That means, every day or two I have to pull the battery inside to charge it.  I have been working on changing the code to use less power, but none them have worked.  The NodeMCU has a deep sleep mode, which required soldering an additional jumper wire between pins.  This draws very little power while in this mode, too little for the battery to recognize that something is connected.  The battery shuts off before the weather station starts up again, which means no waking up.  I haven’t decided what to do yet.  I could build my own solar circuit and battery, keep looking for software options, or take this battery apart and hack it’s circuit.  We’ll see what the future brings.  In the meantime, here are some pictures of it mounted above my garden.

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Save My Truck

My son and I have been getting into these stop motion videos.  I came home from work and he had made several more.  Here’s a short compilation of what we’ve made.  I made the first one (to try out the app) and he made all of the others.  I like how he used extra Lego for the crash between Mator and the train.

 

 

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Stop Motion

My oldest wanted to use my laptop yesterday to make a stop motion video.  He came up with the idea all by himself and all I did was show him how to set things up.  This morning I found an app that will create the video automatically and he started using that.  Tonight, we decided to make a video together, along with his brother.  We had a fun time.  The boys LOVED the ending.

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Weather Station Complete… Sort of

I got my weather station all soldered together and mounted in the solar shade.  I designed a block to sit on top of the shade that will hold the battery.  I also printed out an adapter for the solar shade to mount it on top of a metal conduit that I planted in the edge of my garden.  I thought I was all done until a few days went by and I got a notification from Wunderground that my station had stopped reporting.  The battery I am using has a solar panel, and I was hoping that it would charge the battery faster than the weather station drained it.  Apparently not.  There is a way to put the control board into deep sleep for a certain amount of time, but it required soldering another wire on the board.  I took the weather station apart and added the wire, only to find out that my battery goes to sleep before the weather station wakes up again.  Now, I need to figure out how to reduce power usage low enough for the battery to charge, but not too low that it thinks nothing is connected.  Back the interwebs for research.

Tapping the holes to mount the board.

Conduit adapter.  It was tight going onto the conduit, but just the right size to slip inside the weather station.  This makes it real easy to bring the whole station inside when I need to work on it, or charge the battery.

Adding the wire for the deep sleep mode.

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Innovation

I often hear the word ‘innovation’ thrown around when people or companies are trying to market themselves as being new, different, or on the cutting edge. This word has been used so many times that I have lost understanding of what it actually means.  In researching a formal definition, it became clear that there are multiple meanings, depending on where you’re coming from.  Dictionary.com defines innovate as “to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.”  That is an open and broad definition that could apply to a lot of things.  The Business Dictionary website has a much more professional sounding way to put it, “The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay.”  It goes on to list other criteria in business-y terms, which are still somewhat vague and remind me of agonizing meetings sitting around trying to define something that could have been completed in half the time if it had been given to one person.  My favorite definition comes from the Urban Dictionary, “To steal someone’s idea, change it a tiny bit, and release it as your own.”   There seems to be a lot of that going on these days.

I don’t know what definition this would fall into, but I think it was pretty innovative of my kids to come up with this.  They weren’t concerned about the marketability or profitability of what they were doing.  They just thought it would be fun to act like the wheelbarrow was a swimming pool, since they don’t have one.

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Video Music

I found a great source for free music for my videos: freemusicarchive.org.  They have a wide variety of genres and different ways of sorting them.  It’s nice to have unique music for my videos rather  than the same old repetitive tune that is over used on YouTube.

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Struggles and Frustrations

Sometimes making can be so frustrating.  I find a good reference on the internet.  I follow their example and modify it for my application.  I try it out and something goes wrong with implementing it.  I troubleshoot that and get it implemented.  Then it doesn’t work like I expected it to.  More troubleshooting. Finally, I think I have it figured out, but when I get it installed I find out it didn’t actually work or there is another issue.  More troubleshooting.  Finally, way past my bedtime, it’s working.  Success!… until the next day, when I find out something wasn’t quite right.  MORE TROUBLESHOOTING.  Maybe I won’t call myself an engineer or maker anymore.  My new title is Troubleshooter.

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Multicolored 3D Prints

My 7 year old son has always been very creative and has figured out how to use my CAD program to model simple things.  Recently, he wanted to make something with his name on it.  He modeled a block and then wrote his name from scratch.  I scaled it up and printed that out for him.

The next day he wanted to modify it.  He changed the shape of some of the letters and rounded the edges.  He also wanted the text to be a different color.  I decided it was time to figure that out.  My slicer (Cura) has a plugin to pause at a certain height.  Unfortunately, my printer (Printrbot Simple Metal) does not have any inputs, so there is no way to resume the print.  I found a few websites that talked about how to modify the g-code.  I just inserted code, similar to below, before the layer that I wanted to be a different color.  When the printer moved off to the side, I swapped colors and manually pushed filament through until the new color came out.

G4 S001 ;Pause for 1 second
G1 X100 Y10 ;Move to (x, y) location (100, 10)
G4 S025 ;Pause for 25 seconds

The print automatically resumes at the end of the pause.  The results came out real nice, though I should have scaled up the model again.

 

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Weather Station Widget

I got a weather widget installed on my website that reports the weather from my station. My station is still reporting indoor temperature because I had some issues with mounting hardware. I bought 3mm screws to mount the NodeMCU board that controls the sensors. When I tried to install them, I realized that they were too big to fit in the board mounting hooked. The board is packed, so I didn’t want to drill those holes out. I picked up some 2.5M screws from Ace hardware, but they didn’t have a matching tap to thread my enclosure. I’m making progress, but sometimes it’s slower than I want. At times like this it’s helpful to reflect on how much time I’ve let pass by not working on it. Puts things into perspective.