digital

In my last post I went through the design of the analog part of the ultrasonic anemometer. Today we will see how the circuit designed last time performs in practice.

It’s been about one and a half years since I started out with my ultrasonic anemometer project. Like others before me I had to notice that this a much more demanding project than it appears to be at first. After countless hours of development and testing I have built this Arduino shield. It worked but the reliability of the measurements was never what I had aimed for. The problem was mainly how to figure out the absolute phase of the received signal. So the measurements were always precise - but sometimes off by a full wavelength. Then I was more or less inactive for most of 2015, mainly due to personal reasons. So the project was kind of stuck but i kept (and keep) getting a lot of encouraging feedback from you folks. I came up with new circuit ideas and decided to pretty much start with an entirely new design and to re-think each and every design choice I had made back then.

There have been two previous posts on this project: one on the concept and the hardware and one on hardware testing. You probably want to check them out first if you’re not yet familiar with this project. Or even better: Click here for an overview over this project.

First tests are being performed on the Solar Charger Shield In my last post I’ve introduced a proof-of-concept Arduino solar charger shield. I went through the hardware as well as the way it works - or at least is intended to work. It was prominently linked on dangerousprototypes.com as well as some other sites and got quite a bit of publicity as a result. Thank you all for sharing this post.

Today I’ll go through each part of my new Arduino shield to see if it performs as expected. If you’re new to my Arduino-based ultrasonic wind meter project, you might want to click here for an overview: /projects/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

My first wind meter prototype is kind of working. The software will need improvement to make this wind meter into something really useful. But both hardware and software are basically functional and can be built up upon.

In the last post I went through the analog board and showed what I had to do to get it working properly. Today I’ll do the same whith the digital board. Click here for an overview over this series of posts on the anemometer project: /projects/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

I’m keeping my word and continue to document this project that I’ve been working on over the last two or so months. In this post I will talk about the digital part of the circuit.