In the background work has been progressing on the improved rain gauge.

There are a couple of criteria:

• need to cope with intermittent extra big deluge
• need to be much cheaper than present varieties on the market
• to achieve that we need to use a tipping bucket rather than a siphon, but find a way to be much more accurate than a tipping bucket
• the solution involves more internal sensors than is typical along with a microcontroller, in this case an arduino micro

This is the first rought cut, used for sizing enclosures (hint: this is too big), designing the funnel and tipping mechanisms and electronics mounting points so we can start thinking about CAD'ing the design for 3D-printing and/or laser cutting

We also spent some time considering casing options for the sensor nodes. An obvious option is to mount the lot inside a PVC pipe, but another way is just using a sealed jiffy case or variant.

Turns out for the Linux based system we need to think a bit more about how to fit both the compute module and sensor electronics in with the solar panel charging circuits.

Probably didn't help that my junk box seemed to be full of plastic boxes that were either too small or too large... Note, the following image is actually equipped with the Teensy LC we wont from hackaday (thanks!) rather than the Linux node

And of course we took the chance of a sunny winter day to go trapseing in a paddock posing for photos:

We also used plenty of cable ties and drank plenty of coffee :-)