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Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 28: New hardware tested

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I last time proudly presented the new RevB board and got a lot of feedback from people who want one, too. As mentioned I have all the components here to ship up to 10 kits but I was reluctant to send anything until I had the chance to do some hardware testing. Not much had changed since the last revision but I don’t like taking chances on things like this.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 26: Rev B Board ordered

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently ordered my first PCB at dirtypcbs.com and the result was promising. So there was nothing stopping me from finalizing the Rev B of my standalone Ultrasonic Anemometer and ordering a protopack. I’ve placed the order a few days ago and expect the boards to arrive here in 2 to 3 weeks. This should be good news for all those of you who have been asking for kits and want to contribute to the further developement of this project. I’ll build up one or two boards as soon as they get here and do some testing. If everything works as planned I can order some more components and ship some kits soon after that.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 24: New Microcontroller and Software Controlled Gain

Sun, 26 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been almost three weeks since my last post and some further progress has been made. I’ve upgraded the microcontroller and can now control the gain of the second amplifier stage in software. But let’s look at the changes in some more detail.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 23: First successful measurements

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post I was happy to report that I managed to get the USB interface to work. This interface has since proved to be extremely valuable in software development and testing. While the device is taking measurements you can look at the results (or intermediate results) at your PC in real time. You can even log large amounts of data to a .csv file and inspect the results in Excel.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 22: USB up and running

Sat, 28 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I showed you the nice new hardware of the new standalone ultrasonic anemometer. But at that time I had hardly any software written for it so I couldn’t do much with its 32 bit microcontroller. So the last two or three weeks I spend lots of time writing code that I’d like to share with you today.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 21: Standalone Anemometer Hardware

Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I went through the design of my new standalone anemometer. Now it’s time to build this thing and see if it works as planned.

After I fried a couple of chips on my driver circuit testing board due to a wrong chip in the power supply I was a bit more careful this time and built up the board step by step.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 20: Standalone Anemometer Design

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I outlined my reasons to ‘go digital’ by adding a powerful on-board microcontroller and designing a standalone wind meter.

In the weeks that followed that decision I tried to find a suitable microcontroller and to design a prototype. Today I’ll show you the result of that work.