Gina

Repaired/rebuilt the anemometer

I've had a look at the pole head instrument assembly (of my 1-wire weather station) and checked the storm damage. Two of the three buckets on the anemometer need replacing. I have a spare ping pong ball and doweling so no problem. The vane is cracked but I think it'll hang together though a couple of drops of hot glue might help. Shouldn't cause too much turbulence. The central hub section seems fine but can't tell until I get it connected up again.

The Arduino logger shield came as a kit which I've now built it so will be ready to try out a sketch soon.

Add to the description above ... Oh, and a tiny ball bearing, rare-earth magnet and reed switch, and some aluminium tube. Fixed together with hot melt glue. Wonderful stuff (if you can keep it off your fingers!!!)

Here's a diagram showing the construction of the anemometer using ping pong balls, bottle tops, wooden dowelling and some 6mm plastic sheet.

Diagram of the sensors at the top of the mast - wind and light sensors.

That funny word is "magnetically". A rare earth super-magnet and an aluminium saucepan lid provide damping to stop the wind vane from waggling about and give a smoother and more accurate wind direction. The diagram also shows the construction details of the anemometer (made from half ping pong balls and bottle tops).

This shows how I used three tracks on the encoding disc to provide 4 data bits.

And this diagram shows the construction details of the mahneticall damped wind vane and sensor.

Here's the 1-wire circuit for the wind instruments. The vane direction is read using 4 LEDs and 4 photo-transistors with a Gray encoded plastic disc between (a duff CD with some of the coating scraped off, in fact). This resolves the 360 degrees into 16 directions - compass points.

Yes, I think it's all very exciting

Probably my most ambitious Arduino project is a weather station. I have already have most of a "1-wire" weather station built (from scratch). I was going to add the humidity and atmospheric pressure using 1-wire components but Arduino components are much cheaper and everything Arduino based seems much simpler and better supported than basic 1-wire. A big plus for the Arduino is that it directly supports 1-wire so all my 1-wire stuff will connect directly without modification.

Before I go into the detail, here is a block diagram of how I'm planning to do my latest weather station.

What's wrong with acrylic sheet? That's what I've used and it seems fine It's a 24" square greenhouse panel. I'm very pleased with my dividing door - glad i made it sliding

Nice

Great for a webcam

WOW!! That's a great first effort - lovely image

Great start Welcome to the wonderful world of deep sky imaging

Very nice and a great start

I wonder how many youngsters can do long division in their head

I still remember Pi as 3.14159 from school nearly 60 years ago Mind you, I do use Pi a fair bit

At least you managed to get out and do some imaging And pretty good for a quick go Not seen any stars for ages here in the UK And last night was really extreme rain causing a lot of flooding in the region with many towns and villages cut off by floods. We had a stream of flood water running through our sheds in spite of most of it being carried away in a drainage ditch. The small strip of land between ditch and sheds was enough catchment area to completely overload the drains No real damage done fortunately.

Posted from "Drowned Devon"

A superb restoration job - well done

Not bad at all for such little data

Yep, that's about right though not necessarily in that order. After starting with a "toy" 130mm Newt and crappy mount the first thing I got was a good mount (already knew I wanted to do imaging). Next was an ED80 scope, DSLR dedicated to AP, obsy, focal reducer and a few other bits and bobs along the way. I have a home made filter wheel half built with a view to mono CCD camera and lots of filters viz. LRGB, NB, later.

Some lovely images you have there - well done

Yes, I got my stainless bolts from eBay too - good price and very quick delivery.

They're pretty good for single subs. Get a nice collection of each and stack them and you'll be well away. Great start - well done