We are creating an automatic weather station (AWS) and so far we have interfaced the Temperature, pressure, humidity and light sensors to an Arduino Uno Board. Now we want to interface a Davis 7852 Rain collector as well.
This is supposed to be used with Davis supplied console. However we want the output to come to one of Arduio Pins. The bucket has a tipping mechanism (A reed switch) so I believe they just send a high voltage when the switch closes. The document mentions following for cable and connector.
Now we want to snip the wire connected to modular plug and interface it to Arduino. Have anyone experience in connecting RJ11 plug to Arduino UNo? What are the Gotchas and how to test with a multi meter?
Hello Good evening, I'm trying to connect "the rain collector of Davis" to arduino, could you tell me how you've connected and if you have some code to make it work? Thanks in advance.
Greetings.
Every bucket based rain meter I've ever seen you push VCC down one wire (the red one in this case) and then tie the other wire to an interrupt capable pin. Every tip of the bucket equals some quantity of rain, and you just count the interrupts as they happen to measure accumulated rainfall.
Some things to think about though is you need to "expire" your counts over time. I've seen this done with a 60 element array and each element represents a minute. If the minute has changed then you zero the element and add your count, if the minute hasn't changed you add your count to the element.
This give you rolling array that shows you rainfall in the last hour. You need to obviously total all the elements of the array and multiply them by whatever a single bucket holds to get actual rainfall.
There are probably better ways to do this but this one is fairly simple to understand and debug.
