Week 3 (20th Feb 2015)

Week 3 (20th Feb 2015)
This is the third week of our weather station project. Continuing with the task completed during the last two weeks, this week we focused on realizing XBee connection between two microcontrollers.
By following the steps listed in the reference book, one of the XBee has been configured as ZIGBEE COORDINATOR AT and the other as ZIGBEE ROUTER AT through the software of X-CTU.
Having tested with the AT commands in Tera Term, both coordinator radio and router radio have been set and checked successfully.

Then the most important feature that we have already realized is the chat between two XBees. It shows that the text which is typed in the serial terminal program on the first Tera Term display window will appear on the serial terminal screen of the second radio.

During this process, we have met several troubles. One XBee on the FRDM-KL46Z did not work for many times. Thanks to the trouble shooting steps and multiple times of tries, we have finally debugged the function and completed the task left for two weeks.
The following tasks include:
First, the signal types of the wind speed, wind direction, rainfall and temperature should be specified.
Second, the most significant task is programming.

Week 2 (13th Feb 2015)

This is the second week of our weather station project. The main progress during this week include:

On Monday, we contacted our professor and realized function of letting the LPC1768 talk to XBee.

As for the following three days, we continued with testing to let FDRM-KL46Z talk to XBee. During this process, we met several difficulties in finding corresponding and efficient pins which should be wired together. We three group members got to know about software of X-CTU which is a quite useful application designed to enable developers to interact with Digi RF modules through a simple-to-use graphical interface. Moreover, what worth to be mentioned was that the reference book that we referred to is 

Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing

Considering the following task of achieving data sending and receiving between FDRM-KL46Z and LPC1768 by XBees, it seems essential to consult that book as well.

On the lab day, we started with programming the overall code. Having tested several example codes, group members got command of method of displaying on the LPC1768.

In order to write the main part of the code, we planned to connect the outdoor wind and rain gauge sensor together with the FDRM-KL46Z. What we needed are 2 sockets with which the sensor can be plugged onto the breadboard.

To sum up, during this week, we mainly focused on testing and learning. Although the visible programming progress is limited, we have the confidence and determination that in the following weeks, we will be more active and efficient in the designing project.

Week 1 (6th Feb 2015)

This is the first lab day of our Year 2 Project. We three group members are researching project of wireless weather station under the guidance of Professor Jeremy Smith. The project aims at designing a weather system which can detect the wind speed, wind direction, rain gauge and temperature through the sensors and then processed the data through mbed microcontrollers and then display the weather information.

During the lab day, first, we three students discussed about the general design and work out a block diagram to represent our basic idea:

We collected the required equipment including:

• WH1081 which offers the wind and rain gauge sensors
• Temperature and Pressure sensor
• Mbed microcontroller FRDM-KL46Z connected with Xbee kit
• LPC1768 with display

We started with assembling the wind and rain gauge, it has been completed as shown below:

After that, we did a little bit soldering work to realize combination of FRDM-KL46Z, XBee and SD Shield:

The most important task of our first lab day was getting familiar with the XBee and programming to realize data transferred between microcontrollers. However, because we haven't contacted to this field, we met several problems with programming. There are still a lot of research work to do about the XBee. 

In addition, we started to get familiar with the FRDM-KL46Z and LPC1768 about their functions and characteristics. We will continue our work and update our progress in time.