[Today’s run: rest day]
I started off the day working on my BeagleBone project. As you may recall, the idea is to hook up weather station equipment to one of these little single-board-computers (SBCs) which will collect the weather data via serial port, format web pages, and serve the web pages over wifi.
I’ve been having some trouble with the wifi angle. But yesterday my serial level-shifter devices arrived in the mail. So early this morning I started working on the serial port setup. I am using a jumper board and the instructions on a couple of websites(1,2). I am using UART2, for anyone who may care.
I had ordered two types of level-shifters from sparkfun.com. One was the cheapie at $1.95 and the other used a real MAX3232 level-shifter chip for $5.95. I wrestled with the cheapie for a couple of hours and could only get garbled rs-232 weather stuff on it. I tried all sorts of serial port settings and nothing helped.
Then I switched to the MAX3232 board and it all started working. So that is that! I now have the weather station data going into the BeagleBone and I can send commands to the weather station also.
Next step was to get the web server and PHP running. That turned out to be pretty easy, again due to a handy website which covered it all.
Now I need to download and install the wview software. I hope to have the whole thing working, except for the wifi part, by the end of the week. Left to be accomplished, in addition to wifi, will be autonomous power sources, maybe a solar panel, battery and charge controller.
