Bootloader

The journey of The Eremitic Engineer begins.

The multimeter does its walking meditation along the lines of wires linking functional units of the system. Beeping its nod to correct connectivity between chip pins, MCU pins, JST connectors and underboard wire junctions. An existential leap takes it across to external boards hosting sensors and controllers that take in and send out data that represents the environment around the weather station.

After a few small projects such as a home made motion activated outdoor LED light involving a 555 and friends and before that, a little weather station on a breadboard using a NodeMCU 1.0 12E ESP8266 with Arduino code, logging temperature to an sdcard with a timestamp from a DS3234 and broadcasting on 444MHz LoRa, I decided to explore the world of the RP2040 with a solar powered weather station I can plonk anywhere and let it broadcast on LoRa and log to an sdcard.

The breadboard version is the reference version that keeps everything sane as it doesn’t move around, unlike the matrix board version. Moving around means stress and broken wires but as my JST crimping improves it’s becoming less of a concern. The first time I took it outside for a test the wind was always in the NNE regardless of which way I was being blown. That was a sure sign the ADC wasn’t involved in anything. The reference version confirmed it wasn’t a software problem and sure enough, one of the sensor wires had broken at the crimp from too much flexing.

Lots to reflect on as I bring it to a production ready state and the other bits ’n bobs arrive in the post. The battery box, the DS3231 and sundry other parts to complete the system.

I’ll be documenting it on its project page where there’s a link to its GitHub repo. A work in progress.