Gina

Rain gauge looks good The Prusa kit sounds like a plan - several people have them and have modified them to make them better but I have no experience of them myself. Seems you need to spend a lot of money to get a good 3D printer but if you buy a cheap kit you can use it to make parts either to modify it or to make a completely new printer. I have done both. Making or modifying 3D printers can be a bit like astronomy - very frustrating at times! As long as you stick to a RepRep type kit you can get parts dirt cheap. Tekkydave has a Prusa kit and seems to know a goodly amount about 3D printers and I think I can say I know a fair amount too So anything you want to know about making a RepRap printer...

That's still more than required just to hold four little LEDs. This is enough.

Further thinking has resulted in a reduced LED plate removing what's not needed.

And the plate that holds the IR LEDs.

Here is the new design for the encoder disc.

Do you mean the bucket holds drops of water?

I'll solder the LEDs and photo-transistors to stripboard (aka Veroboard) so either 0.2" or 0.3" apart. That's either 5.08mm or 7.62mm so the 3 wide would be 10.16mm or 15.24mm. I think 5mm separation between tracks would be sufficient but I guess 7.6mm would not be beyond the pail and less chance of crosstalk from stray light. The current system has the 0.3" spacing. This would mean increasing the size a bit to allow for the extra hub space for attachment.

Small change in design to take account of assembly. The encoder disc (black) will just be a flat plate with slots plus holes for screwing it to the hub (yellow) that takes the vane shaft and magnet support. Actually, the latter could be printed as part of the hub rather than being a piece of bent aluminium. The IR LEDs will be mounted on a disc (green) which is screwed to the fixed part (blue) that is attached to the aluminium pan lid. The LEDs will be connected in series and the two wires fed to the power supply (via resistor).

Here is a rough cross-section of the wind vane hub with separate IR LEDs and photo-transistors either side of the encoder disc making the light path much shorter than reflection plus no loss due to less than 100% reflectivity. It does mean that more separate parts will be required in order to make it possible to assemble. Not to scale.

Here is a cross-section of the reflective version of the wind vane mounting. Now designing a transmission version. The previous one was before I had a 3D printer so a lot more difficult!

Post disappeared again

Cropped and with DBE but I think the DBE could be better. Curves applied to help bring out Simeis 147 and reduce IC410.

Following advice from IanL about PixInsight, I have a new integrated image of Simeis 147 with IC410, with better amp glow subtraction. Needs cropping to remove registration borders. This is a screenshot of PI with STF histogram stretch. A dose of DBE would help too but the main thing required is a lot more data.

Yes, I think transmission would be much better than reflection. I look into that again.

That looks fine

I've moved my Pilot 3D printer off the table and onto a cabinet in the corner where the UP Plus 2 printer stood. Also removed the fume cabinet ready for a new bigger one for the Pilot. That leaves the table free for experiments.

Been doing some research. The photo-reflective sensors I'm using for the wind direction encoder are infra-red and it seems that black ABS reflects IR - doh I think the ideal way to make an encoder disc that works with reflective IR sensors would be to carefully cut black velour flocking material to the shape of a Gray encoder and stick it onto aluminium foil or a thin aluminium disc. OR cut suitable holes in aluminium sheet and put black velour behind it. Actually, I guess I could print a fairly thin Gray encoder disc, glue kitchen foil to it and cut out the holes. Put black velour behind it and there you are Maybe a light coloured ABS would reflect enough light on its own. Think I'll make up a test rig with one of the IR reflective sensors and measure the collector current with various colours of filament. I can also test the reflectivity of FLO flocking material

Very nice

Ah yes well... TBH I wouldn't go below 1mm but even that needs a good printer.

A problem with opto-sensors is that the output current varies quite a bit and also is sensitive to noise. Maybe that's why most commercial weather stations seem to use magnets and reed switches. An alternative would be Hall switches, which I'm rather fond of I have to say I think they are more consistent than reed switches as to the distance at which they operate. Maybe I could get away with just 8 and make use of overlap. I think some experimenting is indicated They're cheap anyway

The other thing I'm not happy with is the wind direction encoder - a lot of variation in the photo-transistor current, at least so far. Maybe photo-reflective sensors are not the best way to go after all. To use the Gray encoder means I can't use slot type photo-detectors - the sender and receiver parts need to be separated. This was the way I did it at first. I'm considering another idea. A slotted disc and software counter with two photo-detectors to allow up/down counting (bi-phase). Much simpler mechanically but would it be reliable enough or might it lose counts and get "out of sync"? I wonder.

How thin did you make them?

Checked up on the approximate pulses per second versus mph and I get about 1p/s for 1mph so 100mph would produce 100 pulses per second or 10ms minimum time between pulses. I reckon even the Arduino should be able to handle this from its interrupt system.

Been looking at the whole design again to see if I can make use of knowledge I have gained since I last looked at it. I don't need to use WiFi if I attach the mast to my observatory which is what I'm planning. Currently the mast is fastened to a fence post to the NE of the scope position and does get in the way of imaging at times. With it placed to the north or NW it will be out of the way - I never seem to find anything to image in that direction. Power will be supplied from my observatory battery backed 13.8v supply and I have gigabit Ethernet available back to the house. I'm not really happy with using discontinued parts as there would be a problem of replacement in case of failure. Also, although the circuitry is built and was working, I have only tried it at room temperature and cannot say it will work when it's very cold though according to the chip specs, it should do. Also, I would prefer circuitry I can publish as a working system for anyone else to copy if they want to. As such, I'm reviewing the whole thing. As far as the wind instruments are concerned probably the worst cast of discontinued devices is the 1-wire counter - a great shame as this is a 32bit binary counter meaning it could count pulses from the anemometer and not overflow for 4,000 years even if we had constant winds of 100mph! I'm going to see if the pulses can be counted in software.

I've used similar things in the past.