Shannon Hicks

The two sensor models perform exactly the same.  We’ve used a couple in the field with existing loggers when replacing some old broken Cyclops 7f sensors.  All we did was swap the sensors and redo the calibration and edit the appropriate 2 lines in the code for the voltage measured in the standard and the blank (nanopure water).  The C-FLUOR se…[Read more]

Can you email me the entire .ino sketch that you’re using with the board.

Everyone has been out of stock of that particular battery for the past 6 months.  As you said, you can use the Adafruit 6600mAh pack (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/adafruit-industries-llc/353/5054549), or you can use the single-cell 2200mAh cell (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/adafruit-industries-llc/1781/5054543).  As l…[Read more]

We ordered a couple of these modules and they arrived a few days ago.  I did some testing the past couple days and had only occasional success at sending data to MMW with them.  We’re thinking the code libraries probably need to be tweaked to work with these new modules, but there’s no usable electrical or software documentation for these p…[Read more]

You can also try disconnecting the solar panel for a few days since you’ve got a fully-charged battery on it.  Then that’ll tell you if there’s any correlation between the sensor noise and charging activity.  On a few rare occasions, a failing solar panel ended up generating noise on CTD sensor data.

You can also try disconnecting the solar panel for a few days since you’ve got a fully-charged battery on it.  Then that’ll tell you if there’s any correlation between the sensor noise and charging activity.  On a few rare occasions, a failing solar panel ended up generating noise on CTD sensor data.

That’s a good find.  We haven’t tried one of those with the Mayfly boards yet, but we’ll have to buy one and see what all might be needed to get it to work properly.  Previous Digi boards required our now-discontinued bee adapter board to change the pin assignments and power supply options in order to work with the Mayfly v0.5 boards.   But the…[Read more]

Have you been to the station to clean the sensor lately?  Also, I’d recommend replacing the logger’s battery with a fully-charged one.  Sometimes when those battery packs are starting to fail (from corrosion on the terminals under the plastic wrapper) they will generate noise which can sometimes affect the sensor readings.

No, the Mayfly datalogger doesn’t know if any data is missing from the website, it just tries to send it every 5, 10, or 15 minutes (or whatever interval it is programmed for).  If the data doesn’t get to the website database, the logger won’t know, and doesn’t send any old data to fill in the gaps. You’ll need to visit the station and manually…[Read more]

It’s probably easiest if you email me your code so I can check it.  We used 8 of those sensors for 2 years in a continuous deployment and didn’t have any drift or loss of calibration, so I don’t think there’s anything else you need to do with it.  If you’ve got another type of calibrated turbidity sensor or a turbidity standard, you could do a c…[Read more]

I sent you some code last year that should work with the Y511-A.  I can’t tell what other changes you’ve made to the code, but in snippet you posted above, the address should be 0x01 on line 7, not 0x02.

When you did the address changing sketch, did you get a positive result using the serial monitor that showed the channel was changed to something other than 1?  Sometimes there’s a glitch where you have to set the channel twice before the change actually happens and it stays on the new channel.

What sketch are you using for the logging sketch…[Read more]

Did you do the example “b_address_change” sketch first, to change the sensor’s default channel from 0 to 1?

They are actually Turner Designs Cyclops-7F sensors that we use for measuring chlorophyll and phycocyanin  (https://www.turnerdesigns.com/cyclops-7f-submersible-fluorometer).  They are supported by the ModularSensors library and there’s more information about them here:  https://envirodiy.github.io/ModularSensors/group__sensor__cyclops.html

That’s a good question, and something that I’m sure a few other people have accidentally done before, me included.  Luckily the charger chip and the Mayfly v1.0 and v1.1 board should not be affected by having a solar panel connected with the wires reversed.  I just did a test here with a Mayfly v1.0 and a v1.1, where I first connected a panel w…[Read more]

I’m not familiar with the new C model, but I did use the older, now-discontinued one awhile back.  Without digging into the manual and the library too deep, I’m guessing it might be an I2C address issue?  The old model used 0xB8 whereas the new one uses 0x38.  So go into the ModularSensors/src/sensors folder and edit AOSongAM2315.cpp, find line 34…[Read more]

That’s not much current, so most relay boards should be able to handle that with no problem.  I think that latching Grove board (https://www.seeedstudio.com/Grove-2-Coil-Latching-Relay.html) would probably work good for your situation so your Mayfly board could activate the relay 15 minutes before you want to sample, and then go back to sleep and…[Read more]

What’s the current draw of your heaters?  There’s a variety of relays you could use, but I know several people have had good luck with various Grove-compatible relay boards, like the ones from Seeed.  But your options are going to depend on how many amps of current the heater draws from the battery.

Have you tried a different microSD card?  Either it’s a defective card or sometimes one or more of the pins in the microSD card socket can get damaged when inserting a card and cause a short-circuit inside the socket that prevents the Mayfly from operating properly.  Are you using the onboard microSD socket on the Mayfly board, or the optional v…[Read more]

Sensor values of -9999 for the Hyrdos21 CTD sensor mean that the Mayfly board isn’t hearing any communication from the sensor.  Did you carefully follow all the directions in the Monitoring Station Manual (specifically section 6) for preparing and programming a Mayfly for use with the Hydros21?  The sensor’s default SDI12 channel number needs to b…[Read more]