Shannon Hicks

Have you tried measuring the voltage being applied to the sensors by using a voltmeter when the channel scanning sketch is running?  For the turbidity sensor’s screw terminal board, put the voltmeter’s red probe on either of the V+ screws, and the black probe on either of the GND screws.  For the CTD sensor’s 3.5mm headphone jack adapter board p…[Read more]

In your 4th picture, it looks like the Grove cable plug may not fully be seated in the grove jack.  Not sure about any of the other ones since the angles in the photos didn’t show them well, but be sure that it’s pressed all the way into the jack.  And your second photo shows that your two SDI12 Grove jack voltage selection jumpers are both set t…[Read more]

Can you describe how you’ve connected the sensors to your Mayfly, there are multiple ways to do it correctly with the adapters we offer and even more if you’re doing it a non-traditional way.  Better yet, could you take a pictures of your setup showing how you’ve connect each of the sensors to the Mayfly?

When the sensor is powered, you should be able to put the two probes of a voltmeter on the little screws on top of the screw terminal board where you’ve connected the ClariVue’s cable to the Mayfly.  Put the black probe on the Gndscrew and the red probe on the V+ screw.   You’ll know the sensor is being powered when the red LED on the bottom le…[Read more]

The calibration sheet from Turner was very accurate for the new sensor, so if you don’t want to buy expensive rhodamine standard right now, you’re probably fine to use the data from the sheet.  But we’ve found that the sensors tend to drift over time so we do quarterly recalibrations of the sensors to make sure they’re still accurate.

Here’s a…[Read more]

Both of those sensor models ship from their manufacturers with their SDI12 address set to ‘0’ (zero).  In order for the Hydros21 sensor to work with the Mayfly logger in SDI12 mode, you MUST change the address of the sensor to anything other than zero (otherwise the sensors is in TTL output and not SDI12).  It’s okay for the ClariVue sensor to r…[Read more]

I assume you are using a Mayfly v1.1 board and not an older v1.0, because it had a hard time providing a stable 12v for that particular type of sensor.  But are you using the onboard 12v source by selecting 12v on the Grove voltage selector jumper, or are you using one of the new screw terminal boards that has its own 12v boost circuit on it?

That all looks correct.  I usually put the Mayfly’s analog Grove jack voltage selector jumper to the 5v position because the old sensors required 5v for excitation, but supposedly these newer ones are happy with 3v to 15v, but we still use them at 5v and calibrate them with that excitation voltage.  If you connect the 6-pin screw terminal board s…[Read more]

The file is there.  Is your computer behind a firewall that is blocking github?  What happens if you click on the link for the EnviroDIY json file?  You should see a simple text webpage with some code talking about packages and platforms.

Can you email me your code at mayfly@envirodiy.org so I can take a look at it?  How many other adafruit ADC boards do you have attached to the Mayfly in question and are they the 12-bit or 16-bit versions?  The Mayfly’s ADC is permanently set to 0x48.  What is the typical and maximum voltages you should see on the sensor?

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]