So Far So Good

Yesterday was the first proper test of the rain gauge with the rain collector outdoors. 'Twas one of those days where it started raining before daybreak, kept it up constantly through daylight hours and continued after dark until about 6 p.m.. Rainfall was never particularly heavy, just persistent.

While it was light enough I took a few photos of the readout. By tea time it had recorded 17 mm (near three quarters of an inch) of rain which should be about right considering how much of the lawn was slowly turning in to a second pond. (background to the illustration) As if the ground wasn't saturated enough already.

I am pleased to say that the real time clock module is keeping excellent time so it was well worth the extra money.

Friday at the Flicks - Great Tit Roosting

Stumped once again for anything really new or outstanding this week. It seems that the Great Tit is roosting in the camera nestbox every night and leaves by first light. This was taken last Sunday morning as she (well it was a she which roosted last year) woke and left the box.





Rain Gauge:

Making progress slowly. Last Saturday I decided to start programming the section of code which counts the number of times the seasaw in the rain gauge flips. Most of the time the seasaw is moving the reed switch is closed so I had to devise a way of constantly and rapidly checking when the flip had finished. I thought it would take about an hour experimenting. In the end it took about two and a half hours as initially I just couldn't get the code to do what I expected. Anyway solved it eventually and set it up in the kitchen sink to give it a real test. You can hear the seasaw flip over and the count shows every other flip which relates to 1mm of rainfall.




I searched high and low for a box to put the electronics in but all those I had were too small so I ordered one which arrived yesterday. I had 'fun' cutting a rectangular hole in the plastic front for the LCD readout but got there in the end. First I drilled a few holes as guides for the corners and then used a side cutting bit from a RotoZip in my battery drill to make a rough rectangle and finally filed it to shape.



Still a long way to go to finish all the coding for storing and displaying rainfall records. At least it keeps the remaining grey cell active.