My home brew system
Posted: Wed 25 Oct 2017 1:47 am
A little about myself. I am 72 and retired from a lifetime working in Electronics and IT, I enjoyed my work and it was also my hobby but my world came crashing down in 2005 when I had a work related breakdown that did a lot of damage and left me on a disability pension. After that things got a lot worse for me with major health and financial issues and I came very close to not making it through all that.
After my breakdown I completely turned my back on everything technical, I just became a user of computers until the early part of 2016 when I started to feel like I wanted to dabble in electronics again so I took it gently, wrote a little software and did a couple of projects which started to make me feel good about that as a hobby again. It was difficult getting back into things, the breakdown left a lot of empty areas in my head and a lot of what I used to know is no longer there and my short term memory is almost non existent as well as the industry changing a lot in the 11 years I was away from it. I kept looking for a project that involved hardware and software that would keep me occupied for a long time, a friend suggested a weather station but I didn't really want one but in one of my searches on an entirely unrelated subject I stumbled across the SteelSeries gauges, I thought they were the bees knees so a weatherstation it is.
I've never had anything to do with weather stations so a big learning curve for me, I made a number of early mistakes not realising how sensitive the sensors are because of the environment around them but I am a bit wiser now. The project is nowhere near complete, I have the temperature/humidity/pressure working outside and inside plus rain is also working since the end of July. I have just received my Davis 6410 wind instruments and I am currently working on that. Still to do are UV Radiation, Solar Radiation and monitoring of the household power.
I know my web pages are very ordinary, HTML was never a strong subject with me and now there is CSS as well, I will look at tidying up the web pages when I finish everything else. I haven't set out to build a station with a high precision of accuracy even though I try to achieve close to that, the main purpose for this whole project is to give my brain plenty of exercise because, at my age, you start to worry about dementure.
After my breakdown I completely turned my back on everything technical, I just became a user of computers until the early part of 2016 when I started to feel like I wanted to dabble in electronics again so I took it gently, wrote a little software and did a couple of projects which started to make me feel good about that as a hobby again. It was difficult getting back into things, the breakdown left a lot of empty areas in my head and a lot of what I used to know is no longer there and my short term memory is almost non existent as well as the industry changing a lot in the 11 years I was away from it. I kept looking for a project that involved hardware and software that would keep me occupied for a long time, a friend suggested a weather station but I didn't really want one but in one of my searches on an entirely unrelated subject I stumbled across the SteelSeries gauges, I thought they were the bees knees so a weatherstation it is.
I've never had anything to do with weather stations so a big learning curve for me, I made a number of early mistakes not realising how sensitive the sensors are because of the environment around them but I am a bit wiser now. The project is nowhere near complete, I have the temperature/humidity/pressure working outside and inside plus rain is also working since the end of July. I have just received my Davis 6410 wind instruments and I am currently working on that. Still to do are UV Radiation, Solar Radiation and monitoring of the household power.
I know my web pages are very ordinary, HTML was never a strong subject with me and now there is CSS as well, I will look at tidying up the web pages when I finish everything else. I haven't set out to build a station with a high precision of accuracy even though I try to achieve close to that, the main purpose for this whole project is to give my brain plenty of exercise because, at my age, you start to worry about dementure.