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.
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.
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.
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.
Recently, I’ve sucessfully tested the new driver ciruit for my ultrasonic anemometer. It performed even better than I expected and I will be happy to use it pretty much as it is.
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/
In my last post I talked about how to get the Arduino to output bursts of 40kHz pulses. Today I’ll go through the rest of the software so by the end of this post we’ll have a very rudimentary but working sketch for our ultrasonic wind meter.
In this post I will go through the testing of the analog circuit and what I had to do to make it work properly. Click here for an overview over this series of posts on the anemometer project: /projects/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/
Today I’ll go through the details of the analog cirquit. Click here for an overview over this series of posts on the anemometer project: /projects/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/
The analog board ready to be connected This is what I would consider the heart of this wind meter. This is where the received signal is amplified and processed so the overall accuracy and reliability of the entire project really depends on it. The functionality of this board can be summarized as follows:
