Shannon Hicks

The protoboards went to Amazon almost 2 weeks ago, even ahead of the Mayfly boards, which got restocked online yesterday, so I think the protoboards should be available very soon, possibly today. Amazon used to get our inventory online very quickly last year, but lately they have been taking over a week or two to get products available after…[Read more]

Amazon shuffles the products between warehouses sometimes, and they list the items as “backordered” while they are in transit and unavailable for immediate purchase. They will show up as “available” when they’ve reached their new warehouse. Normally this kind of stuff isn’t apparent if there’s sufficient stock of the items, but it’ll show up at…[Read more]

Unfortunately the way Amazon does our item fulfillment, their system won’t allow backorders, and they only take orders when the item is in stock and physically in their warehouse. Sometimes they are very quick to get the item online and available, but other times it takes them up to two weeks to make our items available after I’ve shipped them.…[Read more]

That’s an interesting idea, I can try it with one of my testing boards later this week and let you know what happens (unless you’re good at removing (and replacing) SMD capacitors if it doesn’t work.)

Another option for connecting a sensor’s 3.5mm stereo headphone plug is to use these stereo jacks:
https://www.amazon.com/uxcell-Stereo-Female-Adapter-Connector/dp/B013D1U90S
Just strip the black, red, and white wires of a Grove cable and solder them to the corresponding terminals of the jack.

And the easiest way to do it is to use our custom…[Read more]

The boards are $60. They were in stock last week, but sold out very quickly. We are working to get more inventory soon.

The Xbee socket is powered from the main regulator, which can source 500ma. If your radio was having trouble drawing current, you’d probably see strange behaviour on the rest of the board. Are you powering anything power-hungry at the same time as the radio? What kind of antennas are you using? Xbee units have a default power setting of…[Read more]

Here are some links to photos of the boards.

Version 0.3:
http://envirodiy.org/wp-content/uploads/20170319_022350.jpg

Version 0.4:
http://envirodiy.org/wp-content/uploads/20170319_022329.jpg

Version 0.5:
http://envirodiy.org/wp-content/uploads/20170319_022228.jpg

I’ve taken hundreds of photos of the various versions of the boards, but we only post the resized photos here on the website. I think the highest resolution one currently online is this one:

http://envirodiy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/20160508_134514-001.jpg

I can certainly upload some other photos if you’d like a different angle or with…[Read more]

How did you verify that the board isn’t going into sleep mode? Can I assume that you didn’t modify the pads on JP1 and that the clock interrupt is still connected to A7 and you didn’t do anything with D10 other than use the D10-D11 grove port for connecting your sensor?

We’ve been busy getting the Mayfly and starter kits back in stock, so now that they’ll be online any day now, we can work towards getting the proto boards listed, so look for those in early April.

For anyone wanting an update on the Mayfly availability, the boards arrived at my office last week from the manufacturer, and after thorough testing of each one, I sent off the first shipment of them to Amazon. Once Amazon has incorporated them into their fulfillment system, the product listings will show that they are in stock and can then be…[Read more]

There are several different methods you can use to wake a sleeping processor using a realtime clock. The example I posted uses the method of triggering an interrupt pin on the processor by using a quick pulse that the RTC puts out every minute. By doing this, the processor can wake up each minute and then it’s up to the user’s code to examine…[Read more]

I’m not sure where you saw something that said the Mayfly only supports a 2.5W panel, because that’s not accurate. The only limiting thing is the voltage that the panel produces — the Mayfly only works with panels with an output voltage of 6 volts. If you use a solar panel with a 9v or 12v output, you will damage the Mayfly.

The reason for the…[Read more]

I am still awaiting the shipment of the latest order from the manufacturer. They had a 3-week holiday last month that put their production almost a month behind schedule. I also had do to an extra round of prototype testing in January because we’ve added and changed a few things on the new v0.5 board. Once I get the new boards, I thoroughly…[Read more]

Just do the software fix as suggested above and leave the clock interrupt on A7, then you won’t have to worry about doing any wiring changes. I added the D10 interrupt option on version 0.4 and higher because I thought it might come in handy for people who had interrupt library complications. But it works just fine if you simply use the modified…[Read more]

The error you’re getting is because the SoftwareSerial library uses an interrupt method that conflicts with the SODAQ_PcInt library. In order to use those 2 libraries together, you have to use the modified versions of the libraries we posted in our Github repo, along with modifying the library names in your sketch in 3 places. Plus you’ll need…[Read more]

First you have to download the Arduino library for the SSD1306 by following the link on the Amazon listing to the manufacturer’s site which will then let you get to their own product listing: http://store.switchdoc.com/grove-128×64-i2c-oled-board-for-arduino-and-raspberry-pi/
On that page there’s a link to their library on…[Read more]

Try this: use X-CTU to reprogram both of the Xbee modules to 9600 baud and then change the baud rate in your Fio sketch to 9600 for the serial port and also 9600 for the software serial port (it’s easier and less confusing if everything uses the same rate). I’ve had trouble in the past with some of my Xbee units printing garbled text to the…[Read more]