Grove 4 pin terminal board

[Mary]

I am trying to connect an ancient rain logger to the Mayfly. I have a pair of wires that come out of the tip bucket. I need a connector from the wires (each wire contains two wires for a total of four) to the Mayfly. I searched the forum and saw a description for the Grove 4 pin terminal board. But it seems to need to connect a power wire. There is no power on the tip bucket. The board with the 2032 battery died. I thought the battery pack attached to the Mayfly would provide the power. (This is my first project, attended the workshop in October and am just getting started.

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[neilh20]

Hello Mary, gosh you may have to provide more detail of what you are thinking you are doing. The tipping bucket is typically a pulse count – it needs to translate the mechanical tipping bucket to an electronic pulse.  So you may want to reference this in more detail.

There is this , never tried it . .. https://github.com/EnviroDIY/TippingBucketRainCounter

[Mary]

Thank you for your help. I’ve ordered a ProTrinket. Basically, I am trying to recreate what the rain logger did before it died. Log date, time and a tip, convert the tip to inches and have a running total per rain event. Ultimately, be able to retrieve the data remotely. We have three broken loggers (very old) and one that is still functioning. We are only measuring rain, not temperature. Info on logger:

https://www.onsetcomp.com/sites/default/files/resources-documents/10241-M%20MAN-RG3%20and%20RG3-M.pdf

We are a volunteer org located in Upper Bucks County PA. http://bntgroundwater.org/

 

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[Shannon Hicks]

If you have the original sketch that someone wrote for the logger, then that should give you clues of how everything should be connected.  There are several different ways in which to connect a tipping bucket to a Mayfly logger, some require a circuit in between to do the actual counting (like the Trinket or an ATtiny), but we’ve had good luck with just connecting the two poles of the tipping bucket switch directly to the Mayfly board and using digial pin 10 (D10) which is a hardware interrupt pin to wake the logger and count the tip.  By activating the onboard pullup resistor (using jumper SJ12) you can just connect one wire of the bucket to D10 and the other to Mayfly ground.  There’s a full explanation in this thread (https://www.envirodiy.org/topic/rain-gauge-tip-data-without-rain/) along with the sample code.  However, note the one drawback to using this method (as mentioned in that thread) that tips won’t be counted if the Mayfly is busy doing something else like making a radio or cell transmission, so an occasional tip might be missed during high rain-rate events (and depending on your transmission frequency).  So having a separate counting device report tips to the Mayfly on demand is a more reliable and accurate method, so people use the Trinket, ATtiny, or other small affordable programmable chip for that.

[Mary]

I went with the ProTrinket/Mayfly solution. My problem is no red light on the ProTrinket, only a green, I have pushed the reset button on the ProTrinket but still no red light. Is there a setting under tools that needs to be changed? If you look up bootloader for the ProTrinket, it says the ProTrinket must be connected to a computer via USB. In the above instructions, the Mayfly is connected to the computer via USB and the ProTrinket is connected to the Mayfly. Is that my problem?

 

I have loaded date/time and the blink sketch so I know the Mayfly is good.

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[Mary]

OK, I’m giving up on the ProTrinket solution. I went with the ProTrinket originally because there was a wiring diagram I could understand (not a hardware person). I need a similar picture for the Mayfly. I don’t understand what the following means: “First you need to enable the pullup resistor on pin D10, which is already built in to the Mayfly board, you just have to close jumper SJ12 on the back of the Mayfly.”

I see the SJ12 D10 P/U on the back of the Mayfly. Don’t know what to do.

 

[Sara Damiano]

To close the jumper on the Mayfly, you need a soldering iron. If you don’t have access to one of those, you might need to go back to the trinket.

You could also order a replacement pendant logger from Onset: https://www.onsetcomp.com/products/data-loggers/ua-003-64

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