Gina

Oh yes, used those a lot.  I agree that they are more accurate.

For the temperature, humidity and pressure sensor unit I have tidied up the display and added dew point for both inside and outside the observatory.  With temperature only accurate to 1°C, humidity to 3% and pressure to 1 hPa there is no point in displaying fractions.

Change of design again.  The sensor part wanted to go a bit higher so I've combined it with the vane arm.  I think this make for a smoother design.

Plate to position the opto sensors.

Amazing!! 👍

Design modifications.  I might raise the wind vane and sensor to give more clearance with the anemometer.

Design pretty much finished though I may be able to do a bit of tweaking to slim it down a bit.

This is how it will look.

And this shows the insides.  Wiring and optical sensors not shown.

I think I may make a change and put the single half circle on the inside and the 4 on the outside.

I have a design and about to print it.

Now to the dimensions.  The sensors have a 3.5mm gap and 4.5mm wide side parts (containing IR LED and photo-transistor).  This means the width of the PLA wants to be 2mm and at least 6mm between.  This gives 1.5mm allowance for tolerances.  That gives me a start for altering the CAD from reed switches to optical.

I think I have a workable idea. First though, the principle.  This is a Gray coded disc.  It has the principle that only one sensor changes at a time so there are no alignment problems.  The code can be converted to binary to give the angle. The black is MSB and blue is LSB.

Next to note that the black and red tracks are the same but rotated by 90° so we can use one track and put the 2nd sensor at 90° to the first and get the same effect.  That means 3 tracks are enough saving space.

Using the slot type sensors means something different from a disc - we go into three dimensions- like this (taken from an earlier design) :- 

To avoid making the "disc" bigger to make space for sensors side by side, they can be arranged like this :-

This is just the general idea and will be altered in size for the present wind direction sensor.  These are very old diagrams produced in SketchUp some years ago.

Just tested a slot type optical sensor and surprisingly a 2mm thick piece of white PLA stops the light fine.  Thought I might at least have to use a coloured filament.

I agree.  You can see the difference but is the one with NII actually better?  I think not.  And this confirms what I found with the whole Cygnus loop - the amount of NII is negligible and the bi-colour image is good.

I remember from earlier experiments that the reflective sensors were very sensitive to daylight and would need serious shielding to provide sufficient darkness.  Will see what the transmission sensors are like.  I would expect that the ON condition would be a lot better than the reflective type so we could tolerate more OFF current.

I'll do some experimenting.

If I were to go optical, the Gray coded discs would have to be on the outside with the optical sensors inside since the rotating part is the outer one.  The discs would actually be rings with the notches on the inside and I'm thinking aluminium filed to shape by hand.  3D filament is not sufficiently opaque to IR.  The optical sensors could probably be set in a 3D printed structure.  These would be the notch type with emitter one side and photo-transistor on the other.  These are better than the reflective type though reflective would be easier to use.

Having pretty much sorted out the ESP32 for the outside and observatory sensors, I'm now looking at the wind sensors. 

I have the magnet distance somewhere near right but the amount of overlap between adjacent reed switches varies a lot, probably due to varying read switch sensitivity.  Can't say I'm very happy with the magnet and reed switches but I seem to be stumped for a viable optical system.

7 minutes ago, jiberjaber said:

The ESP has a storage drive on it which you can use and reference in your web pages, you could store an icon on there or reference a png on the net somewhere in the html?

How do I do either of those?

Added a 5 minute period and compared pressure.  Taking 0.1hPa difference to trigger Rising or Falling but don't know if 5m is long enough.  Maybe an hour would be better.

I would like an up arrow and a down arrow symbol or character rather than words - any ideas anyone?  Please?

Getting there - in fits and starts 🤣

Working now.  Time for a cuppa I think...

Groan - lost that showLocalTime(); line again so it isn't updating the time.  Added it now.

Replaced all instances of "DateTime" with "myDT".

Next to get what amounts to a software interrupt working - getting it to build a log of the sensor readings complete with time code and check pressure over a longer period.  I guess the current readings of temperature and humidity are all I need.  I'll add dewpoint calculations though.

Getting near the stage where I want to upload over WiFi too.  Not that the exercise of popping in and out to the obsy isn't good for me 😁

It works!  😀  Could do with being a bit bigger though - not a problem.