Raspberry Pi serial port (not USB)

[William Phelps]

I have weewx running on a Raspberry Pi connected to a Davis weather station one via rs232. I was running a USB Serial adapter, but like many others I kept having USB failures that seems to be common with the Pi. About 2 weeks ago the USB Serial adapter quit altogether, and I decided rather than replace it I'd try something else.

I bought an inexpensive RS232 to TTL board ($10, by NKC electronics, on Amazon). I picked up a small prototyping board and header (from Adafruit, $8), and put it all together with a little wirewrap.

Disable the serial console port to free up /dev/ttyAMA0, and update weewx.conf, and it's back up and running. 

William

[Thomas Keffer]

Pretty slick! Now we know who to come to for hardware advice!

-tk

Tom Keffer

kef...@threefools.org
+1 541-386-8891 (h)
+1 541-490-9507 (c)

Skype: tkeffer

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[gjr80]

Wow, wire wrap - way to go. I seem to remember collecting wire wrap tools like they were pencils when I went to tech - you always seemed to lose one and gain two or three.

Gary

[Andrew Milner]

Now if it could be miniaturised to fit inside my Pi case ....... nah .. I forgot ... I got one of these new fangled USB weather stations ..... just wish I could get the Pi to handle a webcam along with the weather station, webserver, weewx, mysql, wx, lighttpd, etc etc without throwing wobblies or giving c****y pictures!!

[david murphy]

Andrew,

Have you seen these articles -

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5071

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5048

[William Phelps]

yeah, the wire wrap is probably overkill, I could have just soldered in the 4 wires, but I do like the process of stripping & wrapping the wires and it's so easy to make changes. I also have a slit-n-wrap tool that's really cool.

[Andrew Milner]

These links are interesting, but I feel would probably need a dedicated pi with camera module - or run the risk of interrupted weather station reads and/or poor quality video.  Must keep the links though - and thanks for pointing them out.  I like the idea of the false cam casing as one of my issues was the short cable length between pi and camera module.  Many thanks though - much appreciated.

[vds]

On Monday, October 21, 2013 9:24:49 PM UTC-7, Andrew Milner wrote:

Now if it could be miniaturised to fit inside my Pi case ....... nah .. I forgot ... I got one of these new fangled USB weather stations ..... just wish I could get the Pi to handle a webcam along with the weather station, webserver, weewx, mysql, wx, lighttpd, etc etc without throwing wobblies or giving c****y pictures!!

The USB webcams tend to be pretty low resolution on the pi, but easily good enough for me.  Check out http://weather.skahan.net/timelapse for the ones my Pi generates (one snap per minute during daylight hours).  The software that I use to generate the movies is 'motion' which is available in the usual apt-get repos. Size per day is under 3MB.

I have the Pi native camera as well which 'does' do much better quality.  I found a modified version of 'motion' that works with the native Pi camera, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.  The 1080p camera generates some massive files in comparison.

Hardest thing to do is find a way to mount the Pi camera, which is on an infuriating short ribbon cable.  I wound up buying the Adafruit case with the clear top and drilling a few holes through the case to screw the Pi camera through.   A bit of a MacGuyver project I guess, but hopefully Adafruit will come up with a case option for the camera board too.