Shannon Hicks

Hi Dan and Jim,

You were at the Stroud Center last week attending one of our sensor station workshops, so your situation is a little different than most users on the forum. I’ll send you an email with more information about the stations and sensors and how we’ll be working with you in the coming months.

I’m going to need more information if you want me to diagnose your problem. When you say “it doesn’t work”, do you mean that it doesn’t compile, or there’s no output on the serial monitor, or is there nothing transmitted by the Xbee?

Also, please answer these questions:
What type of USB-to-TTL adapter are you using to program the Fio?
How is…[Read more]

Past your code into this thread and I’ll take a look at it. Also, did you change the baud rate of the Xbee modules using X-CTU, or are they still set to the default?

Also, if you’re ever having trouble with a new sketch because you’re testing several new sections together for the first time, try removing some of them to simplify it and make sure…[Read more]

If you’re using the Fio board, then your Xbee is forced to use the only hardware serial port on the board (pins 0 and 1). So if you really want to print out data to the serial port at the same time, you’ll need to use 2 other pins for that, using SoftwareSerial. I assume you’re using a FTDI adapter for connecting your Fio to your computer since…[Read more]

Do you only get that “extra junk” (as you described it) on the serial monitor when the Xbee is attached? It looks to me like you’ve got the Xbee radio on the same serial port as the board communication (the Arduino’s hardware serial port, which is pins 0 and 1), right? The Arduino board is talking to the PC at 57600 baud, but the Xbee has a…[Read more]

What kind of distance are you trying to cover with your radios? There are a variety of Xbee options that will work for short distances (several hundred meters), but there are also models for transmitting over a kilometer or more. There are different models for different regions of the world because of frequency regulations and other issues, so I…[Read more]

Most 16×2 LCD displays require 5v, but there are some that’ll work at 3.3v if you shop around. You could also use a 5v display with the Mayfly because you can use the 5v boost circuit to power it, but remember that you’ll have to do some logic-level shifting on the data pins. You could accomplish that by putting one of these inline between the…[Read more]

If you’re trying to use a Zigbee module and a microSD card with an Arduino board, you could buy a bee adapter shield and a memory card shield and stack them all together. If you’re logging data over time, you’ll also want a real-time-clock module to be able to timestamp the data on the memory card. But instead of trying to get 4 separate boards…[Read more]

No, you’ll never need an external supply even if you’re using dozens of 5TM soil moisture sensors. The reason is that the code I posted above will only power one sensor at a time. All of the other sensors are basically sleeping and using virtually no power until they are “woken up” one at a time by the call to their SDI12 address. One 5TM…[Read more]

What voltage were you putting on that white wire with the external supply?

If you use the “address_change” example, the sensor red wire needs to go on D9 if you want to run the code as-is. If you hook the sensor up as I described and run the address_change example and still don’t get anything, post a new photo of that setup. If you have a…[Read more]

I don’t know what the white box is in the top right of that one photo, but I’m assuming it’s an external power supply. I’m not sure why you are using that; the sensor definitely doesn’t need it and all 3 sensor wires are supposed to be connected directly to the Arduino board. As stated in several of my replies above, connect the sensor red wire…[Read more]

The code I posted above has been running for years on several different loggers, so it is correct. Have you verified that you correctly wired the signal, power, and ground lines of the sensors to your Arduino board. If you’re using a Mayfly and one of the Grove ports, you’ll need to turn on the switched external power for the grove port (D22),…[Read more]

The auxiliary A/D converter on the Mayfly is a ADS1115, so I prefer to use the Adafruit library for interacting with it (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_ADS1X15). It uses the I2C port with the default address of 0x48. If you want to add other external ADS1x15 chips, just set the address on any additional chips to 0x49, 0x4A, or 0x4B.

See…[Read more]

In case anyone checks this thread after looking for Mayfly boards on Amazon, we are currently sold out of boards and starter kits. More boards are currently being made, and we hope to have a large number of them back in stock on Amazon in February.

I’m hoping to have the protoshields listed on Amazon by the end of January.

It’s not mentioned above, but equally important to surviving the cold weather and reduction in sunlight is to increase the capacity of the LiPo battery being charged by the panel. Depending on the type of sensors used and their current draw, a smaller battery might have trouble making it through a long stormy winter week, no matter what size…[Read more]

It’s not mentioned above, but equally important to surviving the cold weather and reduction in sunlight is to increase the capacity of the LiPo battery being charged by the panel. Depending on the type of sensors used and their current draw, a smaller battery might have trouble making it through a long stormy winter week, no matter what size…[Read more]