We’ve seen a lot of uses for the now-ubiquitous ESP chip, including a numerous wilderness-monitoring devices.
Pluvi.on stands out with some attractive solutions and a simple design.
A lot of outdoor projects involve some sort of stock weather-resistance enclosure, but this project has a custom-designed acrylic box. About 4 inches across, the gauge uses a seesaw-like bucket to measure rain—a funnel, built into the enclosure, sends water into the gauge which records each time the bucket mechanism tilts, thereby recording the intensity of the rain. A NodeMCU packing an ESP8266 WiFi SoC sends the data to the cloud, helping predict the possibility of a flood in the area.
[Diogo Tolezano] and [Pedro Godoy] developed Pluvi.on as part of a Red Bull Basement hacker residency in São Paolo, Brazil. Interested in building your own Pluvi.on? They have building steps up on Instructables.
More ESP projects abound on Hackday, including this ESP mini robot, a data-logging hamster wheel, and an ESP32 information display.
This project rocks!
s/rocks/rains/
Developed is a bit of a overstatement. This mechanism is well known and its design is a pure copy of what you get when you buy low cost weather stations on ebay.
I first saw this see-saw design in a hydrographic station on top of Table Mountain (Cape Town). The see-saw was made of brass, and the station was already about 100 years old. Every time it seed or sawed (are those words?) it moved a pen pointer up a paper chart on a roller that (used to) rotate slowly to record when and how much rain fell.
Nice project though. It allows anyone to benefit from an old design.
So data about rain is sent to the cloud…
Now we can closer the feedback loop and do a proper pid control of the amount of rain we get.
To keep it constant (= maximum).
São Paulo, no Sao Pãolo.
not*
Not not.
Sorry about that! Fixed.
Cool!. Kudos for our Brazilian friends ^5
There is also a $15 rain gauge sensor with the same principle in mind on aliexpress.
It’s from a cheap Chinese weather station, it has a reed switch and a cable. A lot of people have hacked it before online.
I think it would be easier to order it and hack it, than to 3D print it, although it would also depend on the situation. A funnel could also be added to cover a larger area of rainfall, thus increasing accuracy.
Links:
http://flowrc.co.uk/hack_a_rain_gauge.html
https://pi.gate.ac.uk/posts/2014/01/25/raingauge/
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-Shipping-Spare-part-for-weather-station-to-measure-the-rain-volume-for-rain-meter-for/32793155455.html?spm=2114.search0104.3.34.YOctRU&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_4_10152_10065_10151_10068_5400015_10304_10307_10301_10137_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10054_5370015_10059_100031_10099_5380015_10103_10102_5410015_5430015_10052_10053_10142_10107_10050_10051_10084_10083_10119_10080_10082_10081_5390015_10177_10110_10111_10112_10113_10114_10312_10313_10314_10315_10078_10079_10073_10120_5420015-10051_10102_10120,searchweb201603_5,ppcSwitch_4&btsid=9670822f-7bcc-49f1-9d2c-07e7aa8ddda2&algo_expid=dffbebdc-e72e-47d6-a5f7-1156d51976ee-4&algo_pvid=dffbebdc-e72e-47d6-a5f7-1156d51976ee&transAbTest=ae803_3
A standard off-the-shelf item.