Some answers to the several questions some of you have asked;
hopefully they are helpful.
First, most of my 8 bit work is with Arduino, and their IDE. I
have used PICs and JAL in the past, but not recently.
1. Cold weather:
- I do not know yet, although I believe it will work fine. The
new device has only been bench tested indoors so far. So many
projects, so little time! Also, the new device is for the weather
station parts of our Little Free Library (LFL, see
https://littlefreelibrary.org/
for more info), located at the end of our driveway. It was
renovated this summer, and re-installed without the weather
station or the internal computer systems, since it was getting
colder, and the reno work had already taken too long. It is now
more difficult to add the items to the LFL, and to test them...
We have had a LFL for about 7 years, with Arduino Nano's, solar
power, batteries, and digital radio. The system has worked near
perfectly all this time, summer and winter, snow, rain, wind...
It is unfortunate I did not have this weather station outside this
past week; temperatures down to about -20C, winds gusting to about
100 kph! my location is in southern Ontario, Canada. Some
regions around us declared disaster emergencies! We were
fortunate not to lose power...
2. Outputs:
My testing has been done only with the I2C interface, and has
worked very well. I will include test code below. I have checked
that the analog output works okay, but I use only the I2C outputs
for my application.
3. Wireless:
I have used the NRF24L01 transceiver module at both remote and
in-house ends, for data collection and some control, for years
also. Again, has worked very well. A nice system to connect with
Arduino Nano. Uses SPI interface. Have also built a NRF24L01 to
Ethernet WiFi Gateway, using an ESP32 module, intended for
connection to a Home Automation system (not configured yet).
4. Software:
The library I used for testing is:
https://github.com/RobTillaart/AS5600.
I also made some use of the Seeed Studio Library:
https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Seeed_Arduino_AS5600
The simple test software I used (a modification of a SEEED studio
test app) is attached as AS5600_MagDiag1.ino (open as simple text
file, if you do not use the Arduino IDE for anything). Allows
easy data capture / graphical display using the Arduino IDE Serial
Monitor and Serial Plotter tools.
5. System:
I see the PDF I included in an earlier post, chopped a couple of
my pictures, when I modified it for smaller size...
I have attached one of these correctly, and added another pic:
1 - the LFL just prior to renovations, showing general appearance,
weather station sensors, solar panels... It is located near the
road, with no connection to house power. Other features include
Neopixels, internal LED lighting, door switches...
2 - the weather station sensors (temporarily fastened to a piece
of wood for bench testing and painting), and electronics package.
The electronics and batteries (3x AA NiMH) are mounted on a wooden
panel that slides into the "attic" of the LFL. The Nanos are
actually Arduino "Micros"; an ATMEGA386 pcb with no USB chip, to
reduce power consumption. You can see an external TTL - USB
interface connected to one of them, for program and test.
Temperature and humidity sensors are also on this board. Weather
data, switch states, solar charge, discharge and battery state are
all sent periodically over the radio link. Local control of
lighting uses the RF24L01 back channel.
Hope this little summary is helpful...
Tom
