I’ve used a PH probe from Inesa Scientific and a combination of DOC and Temperature sensor Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi.
The current setup is as follows:
Arduino gathers data from the probe and will display in Grafana through Node-Red. It shows the reading for every 1 second.
Th setup works quite well, but the readings are quite noisy. I’ve calibrated the probe using buffer solutions 7.01 and 4.01, and I’ve also installed a good power supply, as well as filter caps on the power input to the sensor board.
The weird thing is that the readings stabilize to within +/-0.2 when I put the probe in a beaker fill with the buffer solution. When the probe is in the container (10 litre of water) itself , the readings average about right, but spread from 6.8 to 4.
I'm not so surprised. Relatively pure water (including tap water) is difficult to measure since it has virtually no chemical buffering capacity. I.e. a minute variation in chemistry (a contaminant, CO2 uptake from the air) will greatly influence the pH reading you get. In addition to this you may have electrical problems with your analog frontend, but keep in mind that trying to measure unbuffered solutions is always tricky, since they are thrown out of balance (pH7) so easily.
That's tricky. I'd strt by eliminating any noise from the sensor and analog frontend itself by making sure that buffered solutions give stable measurements. If that has been accomplished, I'd just take several measurements and average them in software. You could work with a rolling average for instance. It will reduce responsiveness of your meter, but that probably isn't an issue as most pH adjustment procedures include a substantial settling time anyway.
Hello, its been several years since I have been using pH sensors and instrumentation, but I used to do so very frequently and in some very critical industrial water treatment applications. In almost every application I had to use what was called a pre-amp. basically amplified the signal from the sensor and reduced the noise in the signal. The typical problem was referred to as a ground loop, basically the solution being measured needs to be grounded to earth. Not sue this is helpful, but inquire to the source of the electrode for their recommendations.