Soil data logger telemetry

April 24, 2016 2 Comments

I have finally found time to build a simple website for my soil data logger with telemetry. The system works as the following:

  1. The data logger consists of a raspberry pi and my SDI-12 USB adapter with a Decagon 5TM soil sensor
  2. The data logger runs the open-source datalogger code I wrote in Python to first get parameters from the user (COM port, SDI-12 address, delay etc.), and then collect data, save to a local .CSV file, and then send the same data to sparkfun’s phant server.
  3. I constructed a web interface to plot the data using Google Charts and download .CSV version from sparkfun’s phant server.

Here is a screen shot:

soil logger webpage

I’ve uploaded the webpage to a server with a link below. The sensor is apparently NOT buried in soil so I can easily take the setup and set it up in different places to test its stability.

Link to the website: Link

Filed under Announcements, Python, Raspberry pi, SDI-12, Sensors Tagged with , , ,

Update SDI-12 USB adapter firmware

April 15, 2016 Leave a comment

I have just released an update to the SDI-12 USB adapter. This update makes the adapter recover from errors in communication so it won’t hang your data logging process in case a sensor is broken while you are logging.

To make the firmware update easy, I wrote a Python script to use avrdude.exe to load the firmware to the adapter. You will run the script just like the data logging script or config script:

  1. Install Python 3.5 with Pyserial 3.0 (instruction in the manual).
  2. Unzip the content of the firmware update package in a folder.
  3. Check the properties of avrdude.exe to make sure that it is not blocked from running.
  4. Run the script SDI_12_firmware_update.py in Python environment IDLE.
  5. Select the adapter’s serial port from a list.
  6. Pick the firmware file, usually SDI_12_translator_v1_x.hex (must be stored in the same folder as the script), then wait for it to complete, which takes less than 30 seconds.

Here is the output from Python:

 

sdi-12 USB adapter firmware update

I had the adapter on COM4.

Once updated, try connect to it using a terminal program and send zI! (zee-EYE!) and you will see the response has version 1.2 in it.

(Updated) This script now works on Windows, Mac OSX, GNU/Linux (64-bit) and Raspberry Pi.

Filed under Gadgets, Python, Sensors Tagged with

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