Some Success

I'm still tinkering with the magnetometer. I found the position I had chosen for the detector was far from satisfactory. The unit is temperature sensitive and when the Sun actually shone the readings drifted about. I keep looking for a suitable fully waterproof enclosure so I can put the detector outside, preferable buried. As yet I have not really worked out a suitable place away from metal objects. As a temporary measure I dug out an old plastic box, lined the six sides with 10mm thick dense foam. The rest of the space I filled with lengths of pipe insulation with the detector in the centre, snugly shielded from excessive or rapid changes in temperature.



A possible geomagnetic storm had been forecast for this weekend. It duly started about 8.30 p.m. last night. I soon found I had to re-work some of the Arduino program (sketch they call them) and finally things were looking and behaving much as expected.



This morning the display is showing some large rapid jumps in the readings. I can't work out whether that is something metal moving nearby, the high speed Solar wind still hitting the Earth or the Earth's magnetic field recovering after the storm. I need to see local readings from more geomagnetic storms to gain more experience.

Tidying Up

After three attempts I finally managed to design and 3D print a box to hold the magnetometer display



I didn't like the detector being held in place with a metal clamp. Not the ideal arrangement for something detecting magnetic fields. A bit of delving in the cast off plastic goodies box in the shed revealed a length of plastic tubing. Now fixed in place with the detector inside.



Glancing at the display a short while ago I wondered what had gone wrong to give such a short lived deep spike in the readout.



Faulty solder joint? Faulty programming? I was much relieved when I checked the displays from the Lancaster University on the Aurora Watch site. One of their magnetometer graphs showed a similar downward spike at what appears to be the same time. My set up doesn't show the more minor variations but if it detects the larger ones then I will be satisfied, for now. Ideally the detector should be buried in the ground. That helps with cutting down temperature variations and influences from local magnetic fields which can affect its accurately.

Lost and Found

A short while ago I found the weather satellite receiver I built from a kit many years ago. At the time I thought it wouldn't be of any use as it didn't seem to cover the radio frequencies used by the latest satellites. A couple of days ago while searching for information for something else on the laptop I found the instructions for the receiver. It can receive all the current polar orbiting weather satellites. Then I went looking for the receiver. Can I find it? Nowhere to be seen at the moment!

What I did find was my kit built magnetometer which I decided to get working again. As I mentioned above, the information I had been searching for was for this receiver. Could I find it? Not a sausage. Anyway I connected it all up with the actual detector fixed high up in the conservatory and aligned East West. I have always been disappointed with the readout being a meter as there is no record of what changes there may have been in the Earth's magnetic field, especially after the Sun has released any charged particles in our direction.







I wondered whether I could use an Arduino with one of my 3.5 inch TFT displays to show some sort of graph of the changes. I had build one for displaying temperature and air pressure some time ago. Aha. I could probably use some of that code. Once again I went searching through files on the laptop and back up drives. You guessed it. Not found. So starting again from scratch was the only way forward. I linked the voltage output to the meter on the magnetometer display to an Arduino Mega fitted with a 3.5 inch display. Lots of typing code, testing and use of Adrian's favoured naughty words I managed to create a scrolling display. Only time will tell how useful, effective or interesting the result will be.





Next project will be to 3D print a housing for the display as it's now just a Heath Robinson layout while in the testing stage. Not a great deal of activity so far today. Just the normal minor variations if the Earth's magnetic field being displayed on the graph.