DIY Data-Logger

[Xringer]

Wow, I read this and felt guilty for letting my little Armite micro project sit dormant all summer..




Check out my heat sensors up top. I epoxied the heat sensors inside of metal tubes and made them look like blasting caps!!

Anyways, the built-in basic does not have floating point, so it's a PITA for a non-programmer like me.
Maybe I'll get back on it after the snow comes..

[ldjessee]

Thanks for posting this picture!

[Ron22]

Question about the SparkFun Electronics logger.
How hard is it to setup how often it logs data? Can I set it up to log every half hour? With this rate how long before it filled up the data card?

[Xringer]

Originally Posted by ldjessee

Thanks for posting this picture!

Are you thinking about getting an ARMite unit?

Dealer:
Coridium Corporation - Programming


Example program info:
EE20N: Hacking Stuff (Wtr'08) — SOEL

[ldjessee]

I have a question Xringer, did you have a particular reason you mounted it to a sheet of metal? Didnt know if you trying to shield it or some other reason other than you had a piece of sheetmetal and it seemed the thing to mount it to.
I have a finished basement and the temperature range from downstairs to upstairs can be significant. I would like to gather some data and see if it is as much as I think it is, or if it would be worth it to rig some kind of switch to run the fan to circulate air.

[Xringer]

The metal sheet was used to give the parts a solid platform.

I wanted to install this down in the basement, so I used a plastic storage box
(like Tupperware) as a dust cover.

Mounted the PCBs on aluminum and bolted the sheet and connection
strips on the inside of the storage box cover.

I will screw the cover onto the wall, and the 'bottom' of the storage bin
will just clip onto the cover. I'll cut some notches for the I/O wires.

I also got one of these.. SparkFun Electronics - Serial Enabled 16x2 LCD - Red on Black 3.3V



Want to display temperatures upstairs.

[AC_Hacker]

Originally Posted by Ron22

Question about the SparkFun Electronics logger.
How hard is it to setup how often it logs data? Can I set it up to log every half hour? With this rate how long before it filled up the data card?

Ron22,

You can change the logging interval to log around 250 tumes per second (more if you log fewer inpits) to 1 log per second by changing a text file which is read at boot up.

You'd have to modify the firmware to include some wait state loops, which is not a huge deal, but with all my projects was just too much resistance.

As microprocessors go, the arm is a good one and pretty powerful, but overkill if you want to read data at 30 minute intervals. This is actually what I wanted to do.

There's the AVR butterfly, which I think would be better.

You should check out this link.

And then this link.

Runs seven years on a tiny battery.

I think this is the answer to your prayers.

Regards,

-AC_Hacker

[AC_Hacker]

Originally Posted by Ron22

Question about the SparkFun Electronics logger.
How hard is it to setup how often it logs data? Can I set it up to log every half hour? With this rate how long before it filled up the data card?

Ron22,

You can change the logging interval to log around 250 tumes per second (more if you log fewer inpits) to 1 log per second by changing a text file which is read at boot up.

You'd have to modify the firmware to include some wait state loops, which is not a huge deal, but with all my projects was just too much resistance.

As microprocessors go, the arm is a good one and pretty powerful, but overkill if you want to read data at 30 minute intervals. This is actually what I wanted to do.

There's the AVR butterfly, which I think would be better.

You should check out this link.

And then this link.

Runs seven years on a tiny battery.

I think this is the answer to your prayers.

Regards,

-AC_Hacker

[cmroseberry]

The least expensive datalogger I have found is an OM-44 from Omega Engineering for $104. Temperature sensors for this logger are $33 (OM-40-C-HT-B). Omega also has a wealth of free tech literature about measurements and data acquisition. The OM-44 does not yet have a Windows 7 driver. I have several OM-44 set aside for field testing my WarmSpring pool heaters. A small cheap data acquisiton system worth considering is a DATAQ DI-194RS. DATAQ offers these as very inexpensive start-up kits. Unlike the dataloggers, this data unit cannot stand alone; it has to be connected to a computer. For small signals, like thermocouples, the signal will have to be amplified to give good resolution for the data aquisition system's 0-10 V measurement range.

After pulling my hair out for years trying to get rid of noise on thermocouple signals, I now favor RTD's and temperature sensing integrated circuits such the Analog Devices AD-592. These transducers are inherently less susceptible to noise.

[AC_Hacker]

cmroseberry,

Originally Posted by cmroseberry

After pulling my hair out for years trying to get rid of noise on thermocouple signals, I now favor RTD's and temperature sensing integrated circuits such the Analog Devices AD-592. These transducers are inherently less susceptible to noise.

You are quite right about the noise in the thermocouples. I was able to deal with this in post-processing. I wrote a macro in Excel that would average over several readings. This smoothed things out quite a bit.

Also available is 1-wire sensors. They are accurate, and can be easily interfaced to an Arduino. In fact, 1-wire interface code is included in the Arduino development system.

-AC_Hacker