[Yesterday (friday): 3.5 miles]
Today I finally dug into the autonomous weather station to see why it kept dying on me. I had been having to reboot it periodically. This week I’ve watched the log files more closely and I set it up to automatically reboot every day around noon. About half the time it would not find the sensor unit serial port and I’d get no readings. Then if I rebooted manually it would work OK.
So I finally decided to dig into it and see if there were any obvious hardware problems. I got it all opened up. I took the sensor unit off and took it into the house for examination.
I didn’t find anything seriously wrong. One of the power wires to the sensor unit (the -) looked like it might be a bit dodgy. So I cleaned that up with no problem and I got it all back together and mounted on the pole again. The pole has warped quite a bit, so I put in some spacers to get the sensor unit plumb and level again (by eye).
Now the readings are coming in and it seems to be doing a good job. I think I have improved it, but we will have to wait and see how it goes.
We also went into town today and stopped at Tractor Supply where I bought two new Rubbermaid garbage cans. We have three old ones which were store-brand, probably from Lowes. And those were getting crispy from being in the sun and the bottoms are very worn from where I drag them out the driveway to put them in place for trash pickup day.
I was wondering how to throw away the old ones, how do you signal to the garbage man that you don’t want it back this time? But when I got home I broke one of them up easily, it was so brittle. I’ll get the other two old ones broken up eventually.