Power & battery management

Until now I’ve been powering the water quality sensors via a USB cable either to an external power supply, or directly to my laptop for debugging. For the sensors to work in the real world they’ll need to have at least a day’s battery life if not a week to be useable. I can imagine …

Debugging LoRa connectivity

After successfully upgrading the firmware of my Uno’s RN2903 LoRa chip, I was still having trouble connecting to The Things Network and seeing a lot of these lines in the serial monitor: I’d tried five different locations across two states, so was getting pretty paranoid that it was either something I’d done in my Arduino …

Upgrading The Things Uno RN2903 firmware

It turns out that it wasn’t only the range that might have been causing my connection problems to The Things Network – Andrew Sargent from OpenSensing spotted that in my logs the LoRaWAN RN2903 chip was reporting a firmware version 0.9.5 whereas the version needed to connect is 1.0.3 I’m on macOS, so ideally wanted …

Atlas Conductivity K 1.0 to TTN Uno

Now that I know the sensor works with a standard Arduino Mega, it’s time to try and get it running on The Things Uno. My first attempts getting the Atlas Scientific Uno code running on The Things Uno didn’t get very far. It seemed to be a problem running SoftwareSerial on the default pins 2 …

Atlas K 1.0 water conductivity sensor

Connecting an Atlas Scientific Conductivity K 1.0 sensor to an Arduino. First of all, let me just say that I adore the packaging of the EZO conductivity and power isolation circuit boards. They were a lot smaller than I expected, which is a nice surprise, as it’ll mean a smaller end product once I’ve packaged …

Connecting to The Things Network

Out of the box The Things Uno has all the code on it to get started. All I needed to do was plug it into my laptop and open a serial monitor in the Arduino IDE at 9600 baud. Green lights flashed, and its status printed to the console. Happy days. I followed the Uno …

Water quality monitor

Six months ago I moved to Williamstown Beach just outside of Melbourne. It’s a nice beachside town about 15km from the centre of the city. The beach is a couple of blocks away via a walk through the botanic gardens – a pretty ideal place to replenish after long days in front of computers (my …