Assembling the SparkFun Weather Meters (rain, wind direction and speed) is a breeze – which is just as well as there are no instructions. The nuts and bolts for attaching them to the supplied pole were not supplied either – M3 bolts work well if you need them. I'd bought the SparkFun Weathershield for the Arduino, just to help me get started (don't worry this isn't an advertorial!). This proved pretty simple to fire up. Firstly I soldered a standard set of Arduino headers on the board followed by a couple of RJ11 sockets for the cables from the weather sensors. There is a demo sketch on the Weathersheld product page works ok with the XinoRF board I have decided to use on the weather end of the operation. The only issue is that the sketch uses pin 8 (well it declares it but never uses it for a status LED). So it's worth commenting that declaration out. Similarly the Weather Shield has an LED wired to pin 8. This is the pin used by the XinoRF to switch on the radio. You can leave it wired up if you want. But I cut off pin 8 on the Weathershield header and jumped over pin 12 so I can light that green LED if I ever need to. It's worth running the demo sketch initially just to verify everything is working OK via the serial monitor on the Arduino IDE interface. After that you can try firing up the radio by adding the following to the sketch to toggle on the radio:
pinMode(8, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(8, HIGH);
Serial.begin(115200);
Then it's time to get the other side of the interface working on the Raspberry Pi. |
Pi Blog >