[Today’s run: 11 miles, yesterday 4 miles]
I finally have ALL of the pieces in one pile for my autonomous weather station.
Today I went to Lowes and bought this big grey PVC box with the gasketed cover. The box is 12″ x 12″ with a depth of 6″. The inside is slightly smaller, still pretty roomy.
Into this box goes the gel-cell battery, BeagleBone single-board-computer, solar panel charge controller, and the 12->5 VDC converter. I’m going to use a junction strip from Radio Shack to tie things together.
I have a 5-wire cable coming in from the weather station:
- +12 VDC
- Ground/shield
- Data transmit
- Data receive
- Data ground
Then I have two wires (plus and minus) coming in from the solar panel.
Inside, the solar panel wires go straight to the charge controller. From there wires lead to the battery.
Also attached to the battery is the +12 VDC bus.
Attached to the +12 VDC bus is the weather station power and the 12-5 VDC converter (to make a +5 VDC bus).
Also attached to the BeagleBone is a USB wifi dongle. I don’t know if that is going to work ok inside the PVC box. I’m thinking I may have to hang it down inside a piece of plastic tubing in order to get a good signal.
So the next step is to put everything together inside the box. Then I can run the system by setting it up under the table on the patio. I’ll put the solar panel on the table and the weather station is already mounted above the patio. That will let me do a complete system test. My suspicion is that I may need a slightly larger gel-cell battery to run it through a 2-3 day period of cloud cover.
I am going to use Gorilla Glue to mount a piece of 1x lumber in the back of the box, the upper part. Then I’ll put the battery in the lower part. I’ll mount my electronics in the upper part by using wood screws and standoffs. One thing I need to research is whether having the electronics in the same box as the battery is going to cause any corrosion or other problems fro m outgasing when the battery is under charge.
