Blog#5 Conclusion (Weather Remote Monitoring System)

In this blog,  I demonstrate my finished Idea, a Weather Remote Monitoring System. I give some conclusions as to what I have gained from this Design Challenge
I answer some questions like, Did everything work as designed? What were the biggest hurdles you had to overcome?
I list some possible enhancements that can be added to make the system more useful.

This blog is part of a blog series for the N-gaged Design Challenge. The sponsor of the challenge OMEGA, has supplied a Layer N Ecosystem Bundle that is used to implement my design.

My Weather Station running

Now finally, I have my Weather Station up and running. The enclosure, containing the Wireless Weather sensor is located on a table in the back of my home. It is recording temperature, humidity, barometric pressure an Light. it has been in the same position for a little over a week now and the battery is still at 100%. The week I recorded was from Friday, May15,2022 to Tuesday May 24,2022. There were a couple of days that it reached a temperature of 90F degrees and a couple days of rain.

Everything worked as designed due to the extensive testing that I did in Blog # 4 of this series. The biggest hurdles I had to overcome were: getting the Gateway to connect to the internet, connecting the TC sensors to the Smart Sensor and the SP-005. After I figured these things out I was able to use the System as intended in my Idea and Design.

PHOTOS

The FREE trial was over and the interval between readings is set at 5400 seconds (an Hour and a Half).The N-layer cloud chart shows the temperature changes clearly and light showing during the daylight hours. The enclosure has a clear cover, so the light is able to get to the sensor. It is not in direct sunlight, but sits on a table on the 1st level of the house under a raised deck. The Barometric Pressure chart shows the bad days as Monday and Thursday. I was not at home on Thursday, but I heard that it rained all day. It's spring time here in New England and you can observe the Tree pollen on the Enclosure.

I will try other places on the Outside of my home to place the remote weather Enclosure.

Inside of my home, I've placed the Gateway and the Thermal connector attached to it to monitor the Inside temperature.

PHOTO.

The N-layer cloud charts indicated that the inside temperature stayed at a comfortable average of 73.88F.  I did not turn on the Air Conditioning system unit until Saturday, when the outside temperature was predicted to go up to 90F degrees. The inside temperature di get up to 81F on Sunday 5/16, but I was not around to feel it. The rest of the week gradually went down to 66F, early Friday morning on 5/20. And then went up again for the weekend. While I was away, it was nice to be able to check the weather outside and inside my home.

Conclusions

this was a very interesting Design Challenge. I enjoyed experimenting with the kit supplied by Omega.

The N-Layer Cloud is very interesting to use. The layout is very well designed. The screens are intuitively arranged to allow easy navigation. The "Measurements" screen  contains date filters to select  the span of time to Display Sensor Telemetry data.

The Wireless Gateway 9GW-001-3-NA) worked flawlessly after a slight connection problem. The connection to the internet could not connect sue to an out of date Firmware version. The Cert was incorrect to allow certification to the N-Layer cloud.. After this was resolve, I did not have any other problems.

The Wireless Temp/Humidity Sensor (SS-002-1-NA) .is the essential piece of the system. It worked almost flawlessly throughout (except for one test where the temperature exceeded the limits of the unit) the testing and is still running now. 

The Temperature Smart Probe {SP-005-01)  uses 2 components in the kit, a USB to Smart Probe Interface (IF-001) and a  M12 4-pin female connector (M12-S-F-FM) .. I had a little trouble configuring it. There was a setting that I had inadvertently set which stopped the TC to be detected. After a few days of trying to figure out why it wasn't working and some customer support tickets opened, I figured out what the solution was. When this was figured out, The unit worked flawlessly.

Future Enchantments

• Existing Device Support
  • What it takes to connect to other devices .
  • What other Omega hardware can I use?
  • What other MCU's in my collection can I use?
• Explore claims of Modbus support.
  • What is Modbus?
  • How do I connect one of my MCU projects?
• Getting Accurate Range Measurements for the Smart Temp Sensor. Maybe I'll see if I can signup for another Free trial and configure the Gateway and Smart Sensor for it. That way I'll have a shorter window to determine when the Connection is lost as I travel away from the Gateway. I would also like to use a GPS device to record the coordinates as I travel around. Maybe there is a way to merge the Time stamps with the telemetry data from the smart sensor or merge the Telemetry data together at runtime?
• Utilizing the Serial and Alarm connector on the gateway.
  • How can I use the TX and RX pins to connect a serial line to an Arduino and send data to the Arduino cloud.
  • How can I utilize pins 4 and 5 to trigger a buzzer.
• On the Gateway utilize the PoE connector to give power to the unit from another location on my home LAN.
• On the Smart sensor.
  • Use another external thermocouple device to measure the environment.
  • Connect an RTD sensor .
  • Connect a Dry Sensor 
• Explore and experiment with other possibilities of the SP-005.
  • RTD interface using 100,500 and 1000ohm Platinum RTD sensors in 2,3 or 4 wire configurations
  • Explore
    
    • Setting alarms
    • ON/OFF Control 
    • And using the 8 pin end to experiment with I2C and discover other possibilities.
• Explore the possibilities of the command line interface for the IF-001
  • Experiment with the USB connector connected to the PC or a raspberry PI. 
  • The user manel USB/RS485 Smart Interface can be used to get some ideas.
• On the N-Layer Cloud
  • Experiment with Events
  • Extracting Data for use in other plotting apps.
  • Saving data to No-SQL DBMS systems like MongoDB.
• Other experiments.