Tuesday April 25, 2023
Today I’ll be doing as much as I can. I’m continuing the cyber-security course that Rory directed me to and I’ll be doing some future job/ internship searching as well.
Lydia gave me an Arduino to play with!
I managed to get the ultrasonic sensor working and then moved to hook up the LCD monitor. I managed to give it a little test (it didn’t work) but by that time it was dinner so I decided to pick it up in the morning.
Wednesday April 26, 2023
Today I spent the day working with the Arduino Lydia had given me.
LCD monitor worked
Lydia brought me a new bread board
Wrote code to integrate the two LCD and Ultrasound
Now the goal was to get usable data from the Sensor. This turned out to be more confusing than anticipated as I’d never done it before.
Here we have the Weather sensor Vaisala TX520 (it’s upside down because I didn’t have a mount)
I managed to get data by plugging directly into the Arduino- but it was unusable because it was just unorganized strings of numbers. I may have been able to go off of this to see if I could decipher the content but decided to try the RS232 Shield instead because the sensor has information on using a RS232 port (*SPOILER* This took an additional 3 days to fully understand and connect the RS232 Port with the sensor).
Also definitely spent much longer than necessary figuring out how to integrate the shield with the arduino… (Brianna the shield goes on TOP of the arduino and conveniently plugs into all of the ports!!!… Almost as if it was incredibly obvious and DESIGNED that way… In my defense… the plugs were covered by styrofoam and therefore I could not see them.)
Managed to get more data but this time it’s coming out as SYMBOLS. Ugh. At this point I had been staring at the screen for hours on end and needed to give my brain a break.
April 27-28 & May 1, 2023
I’m going to group the next 3 working days into one because they were all focused on the same thing, and the progress was painfully slow despite the immense amount of effort put in. Unfortunately, I’ve gone above and beyond implementing this sensor with an arduino at the cost of precious precious time, patience, dignity, and reputation (oops). Hopefully my mentors aren’t too disappointed.
Some lessons that I have learned and utilized from this experience (that may seem obvious) I summarized below:
Do as much research on all the components present as possible before sinking too deep in the problem.
Ask questions, ask questions, ask questions.
Keep good notes of the progress, and link to any useful information you’ve found.
Create a general plan of attack/ blueprint of method and change whilst you go along.
Don’t get hyper fixated on the one problem. It’s easy to just look at the problem at hand and come up with a specific solution. However, it’s innovative to see how this problem might be similar to other problems, and even more creative to adjust your solution to be applicable to many problems (Thank you Lydia!).
And so without further ado I’d like to present to you…
The Arduino LCD Output NMEA Sensor reader (TALONS (ignore the r))
(Yes I included more words so I could make a catchy acronym. As you can see that didn’t work great, but the initial alternative was “ANTS” which came out as “Arduino NMEA The Sensor”… which wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.)
Now if you say it’s silly that there’s an acronym within the acronym (NMEA, a legitimate acronym: National Marine Electronics Association) then I don’t know what to tell you other than I put blood, sweat, and tears (minus the blood) into this program so there.
Though anticlimactic, here is the result of all that work. A LCD monitor that displays sensor data! Note that this code is (hypothetically) integratable with all sensors that have an RS232 connection and NMEA formatting. Also, the string displayed is not the full data string output by the sensor and so options of either getting a larger LCD or having the data scroll will be explored.
I will not be including the code here because looking at it makes my eyeballs sad.
Over the weekend (April 29-30) I took full advantage of the bike and went exploring blue holes, caves, and mangroves!
ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF “Brianna On a Boat” (BOB)…. haha
We will see what adventures Brianna can find herself in with not one but TWO cruises this week. A quick day-long hydro-station on wednesday and then the MOORING CRUISE Thursday-Monday!
Thank you for your time 🙂