sun, 15-may-2011, 11:25
Battery, Arduino, XBee

Battery, Arduino, XBee

Several years ago when I started messing around with Arduino and building my own weather station, I bought a few XBee radio chips with the idea of setting up some more remote sites without having to run wires out to the sensor stations. I spend several frustrating hours trying to get the radios to talk to each other, but couldn’t get them to work (I think this was because they were in API mode instead of AT mode). Then I got Building Wireless Sensor Networks and Arduino Cookbook and finally got everything working.

At the same time, the batteries in our UPS at work needed to be replaced, and rather than immediately recycling them, I took a couple home to see if they still had enough juice in them to work in a remote sensing capacity. They’re 12 volt lead-acid batteries (which may make them unsuitable for winter) that were rated for 5 Amp-hours when they were new. That should be plenty of power to drive an Arduino, XBee and a couple sensors. The XBee chips have some data pins on them, so I may be able to eliminate the Arduino from each sensor station, depending on the type of sensor I use.

The current setup, shown in the photo at the top, is designed to see how long a remote station can run on one of the batteries without any sensors and at springtime temperatures (typically between 20°F and 60°F at our house). The Arduino is reading the input voltage and sending it wirelessly to an XBee coordinator plugged into a SparkFun explorer board and connected to my small eeeBox computer.

Here’s the circuit diagram:

Circuit diagram

The analog input pins on the Arduino board are expecting voltages between 0 and 5 volts, so I’m using three resistors as a voltage divider to reduce the input voltage (nominally 12 volts, but potentially as high as 15V) to a range safe for the board. The sketch looks like this (almost identical to the sketch in the Arduino Cookbook except that the formula for resistorFactor is incorrect in the book):

const float referenceVolts = 5;

const float R1 = 2000; // A0 to V+
const float R2 = 1000; // A0 to GND

const float resistorFactor = 1023.0 * (R2/(R1 + R2));

const int batteryPin = 0; // A0

void setup() {
   Serial.begin(9600); // to XBee
}

void loop() {
   int val = analogRead(batteryPin);
   float volts =
     (val / resistorFactor) * referenceVolts * 10;
   Serial.println(volts);
   delay(1000);
}

Because the Arduino transmit pin (D1) is connected to the XBee receive pin (DIN) and the Arduino receive (D0) is connected to the XBee send (DOUT), anything the Arduino sends to the serial port is redirected to the XBee, which immediately transmits it wirelessly to the XBee receiver chip in the house.

At the moment, I’m only able to have the sender and receiver about 50 feet from each other before losing the signal, but I think that a pair of boards with whip antennas will work better than the chip antennas I’m currently using. I also set up my network such that the XBee Pro board (which has a supposed range of a mile) is the coordinator receiving messages, but I think it will work better as the sender. When the battery experiment is over, I’ll reverse the position of the XBee boards and see if I get better performance. I’d like to have a station out at the red cabin and potentially somewhere on the hillside, and for that to work the radios will need to be able to communicate over several hundred feet.

The circuit diagram was generated using circuit macros, which take circuit diagrams written in the m4 language and turn them into PIC files which are converted into LaTeX code using dpic. That sounds complicated (and it sort of is), but I much prefer describing the circuits in a text file than to trying to draw them using XCircuits or some other graphical tool. If you’re curious, you can download the code and a Makefile for generating the images.

Here’s what the data looks like so far:

Voltage over time

So far all I can see is a diurnal pattern associated with temperature: it was about 56°F at 6:30 PM last night when the data started, dropped to a minimum of 27°F at around 5:30 AM, and it’s been rising since, hitting 50°F at the end of the period shown on the plot.

sun, 05-oct-2008, 17:23

Baseball fuzz

oct 5, 2008; red sox v. angels

Major League Baseball is doing it’s best to ruin my baseball experience this season. I finally gave up on Gameday Audio after all my struggles trying to get it to play smoothly on my MacBook Pro (Windows Media format might work well on Windows, but it frigging sucks everywhere else). Once the piteous spectacle of the NFL started, my local AM radio station stopped broadcasting Sunday Night Baseball (and all the baseball playoff games this Sunday), which was the only opportunity I had to listen to games. And, the first round of the playoffs and half of the second round aren’t on regular television anymore (they’re on TBS).

Turns out that TBS is broadcast over the air on channel 28, but as you can see from the image, it doesn’t come in very well at our house. Despite all that, though, I’m watching and scoring the game. MLB hasn’t completely lost me yet.

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