I have been hiding in the background for a while being pre-occupied with other things (Life), but am taking the time to post what I am up to. I have been busy working on the design of an eventually accurate digital rain gauge. Rainfall measurement is important in agriculture and a lot of activities and planning are related to rainfall. Current measurements of rain involve travel to manually read graduated cylinder gauges. These tell you how much rain fell since you last measured it. Helpful and in most cases good enough, but labour intensive.

I have looked at many different digital rain gauge designs and settled on the tipping bucket gauge. I plan t make my own with an 8" funnel and have each tip represent .25mm of rainfall. I will use 150mm stormwater pipe for the gauge body. I intend to have the water go to a collector so that I can check the accuracy of the digital mechanism. For the tipping bucket I am considering making the prototype from some unetched copper clad board.

The electronic side of the gauge is a work in progress at this point. I am building the prototype with an Arduino nano using the Atmel 328P chip. This will allow for versatility in data output. For the initial prototype communication I will use an ESP8266 module with the MQTT client firmware. This will be fed by the Nano. The Nano may become an IC2 slave when we start merging the sensors and functions and a custom PCB will be designed to combine things nicely. The gauge will work by collecting rain in a tipping bucket design and counting how many tips occur over a given period of time. I may use the timer function of the Atmel chip to gauge how long between tips to give an indication of rainfall intensity. This may help for calibration. It will be nice for my records to include this information as rainfall intensity can make a difference to many aspects of agriculture.

At this point I have all of the components I need to make the first prototype and have the nano and a hall effect sensor on a breadboard outputting data over the com port for each hall effect sensor activation. I plan test the hall effect sensor's latching function better as that will influence my bucket design, which will be the next step. My next update should include some pictures and hopefully some progress.