Update on the SDI-12 + Analog USB adapter

Here is an update:

In case you wonder what all those green screw terminal blocks are doing, here is a graphical explanation:

Both the SDI-12 USB and SDI-12 + Analog USB are explained in this illustration.

To maintain the same compact size, I printed all the pin information on the bottom of the board again. So if you don’t know what a certain pin on a block does, just flip it around and you’ll see it. The jumper information is all on top side.

The SDI-12 + Analog USB adapter comes with a jumper to select either internal 5V or external voltage at the Ext. Power screw terminal block. You may connect a small 9V battery to the Ext. Power screw terminal block. You can also connect your  12V battery that powers your logger to this pin. The external power is only sent to the SDI-12 sensors. It’s not powering the adapter or sent to the analog inputs’ “+” connections. Those “++ connections are always from the 5V USB power. There are 3 pins on the terminal block and the center pin is not connected to anything. It makes it easier to separate the + and – of the external power and I don’t have to source 2-pole blocks besides 3-pole blocks.

All four SDI-12 blocks have “+ S -“. The “+” is either USB 5V or external power depending on the power jumper. “S” is SDI-12 signal. “-” is ground. All grounds should be connected together. These four blocks are all connected. They are not four separate buses. There is no way to transparently bridge one USB serial port to more than one SDI-12 bus. If you wish separate SDI-12 bus for each sensor, which is unnecessary, get a separate adapter for a separate SDI-12 bus. This need for separate SDI-12 bus may come from some suspicion that if a single SDI-12 sensor breaks, it may take the whole bus down with it. I have not been so unfortunate and broken SDI-12 sensors I have had didn’t affect good ones. In any case, a broken sensor needs replacement. Unless you deploy redundant sensors one set on each SDI-12 bus, you are OK with a single adapter that bridges a single SDI-12 bus for all sensors.

The four analog channels are as accurate as 0.02mV when the signal is small, below 0.256V. The adapter automatically uses the best scale to determine the signal. The highest signal allowed is 6.144V on any channel. There are 6 ranges (gain levels), with maximal ranges of 6.144V, 4.096V, 2.048V, 1.024V, 0.512V and 0.256V. Within each range of voltage, the analog input is turned into a numerical value between 0 and 32767. So if you have a signal that is 0.1V, using the largest range of 6.144V will give an smallest change of 0.1875mV. This sounds very accurate, because this change is 0.1% of the signal. But the real resolution of the ADC is not the smallest change. It is usually many times that. Plus there is fluctuation in supply voltage and noise in the signal. The result is likely in the neighborhood of 2mV. This becomes 2% of the signal magnitude. But if you use the 0.256V range, its smallest change is 0.0078125mV. The accuracy is about 0.02mV to be conservative. Since SDI-12 standard has no way to change scale, the adapter does it automatically.

The auto scale is done with a 10%~90% range. The adapter starts with the largest scale to protect the converter and reads the signal. It then calculates the smallest scale that will fit the signal within 10%-90% of the scale. It reads at this scale and returns the value. Each channel is auto scaled independently from the other channels so you may have some larger signals automatically read at a larger scale and smaller signals automatically read at a smaller scale.

The meaning of single-ended channel is that each one of the four channels is read against the common ground. This is less accurate for small signals over long wires. If you have a pyronometer or some other small voltage signal sensor, you may want to use two channels in differential mode. In this mode, the “+” wire is connected to say channel 0, and the “-” wire is connected to channel 1. The difference between these two are read and the difference may either be positive or negative. Range of the difference between these wires can be +-6.144, … +-0.256Vetc.

(to be continued)