ioprog

Introduction

As mentioned in the previous post I’m hoping to put together a weather monitoring system. It will consist of an outstation in the garden which will be solar powered. The outstation will send data over a radio link to a base station located indoors. This post outlines the radio link code and setup.

The outstation radio wiring

The figure above shows the connections between the outstation MCU, the BMP180 pressure/temperature sensor and the NRF905 radio module. There are lots of connections to the radio module and I’m not sure they are all strictly necessary at the moment but for now they stay.
The NRF905 can transmit at a number of different frequencies. After some trial and error I decided to go with a frequency in the 433 ISM band as it seemed to work best (the NRF905 is on a breakout board which already has inductors and capacitors in the antenna circuit which I suspect were tuned for this band). The actual module is supplied from dx.com (link). Overall I found this module much easier to use than the NRF24L01.
The code for the radio link is available on github over here. This code transmits an counter value once per second at maximum power (10mW). This current consumption while transmittiing is quite high (about 29mA) but this current burst is pretty short lived. Early indications are that the range is sufficient for my purposes though I may fiddle with the antenna later to see how far it can be pushed.
A (messy) prototype is shown in the photo below

You may notice the ST-Link debugger salvaged from a Nucleo board attached to the target. This debugger was reflashed with the Segger/J-Link firmware and behaved very well.

The base station

The base station consists of an STM32L011 Nucleo board attached to an NRF905 module. A photo is shown below (wiring details in the code only for the moment)

The Nucleo outputs any data it receives over its built-in USB/Serial converter. This is displayed on the host PC.
One problem arose with the STM32L011’s SPI interface which is covered in its errata sheet. There is a timing problem with the SPI pins and ST provide a simple fix for this (which I found out about after two days of head scratching :). Code for the base station is available here

Next post

The next post will deal with the issue of power consumption on the outstation. This needs to be kept as low as possible if the solar power cells I salvaged from cheap garden LED lights are to work out.