For the past few weeks we have been working on a water quality monitoring system prototype composed of Atlas Scientific sensors/circuits, and an Edison development board.
When all of the equipment came in, the first thing we had to do was solder the I2C board for the circuits. James, Vaul and William got all of the Female BNC connectors soldered onto the carrier board as well as male headers onto the Edison breakout board.
Once all of that was done, we updated the Edison’s yocto image to version 120 and got the circuits for each probe mounted on the carrier board. William and Vaul looked through all of the documentation for the Edison and the circuits to figure out the I2C pin on the breakout board as well as how to put the circuits into I2C mode.
To make sure that we had all of the pins connected correctly and the software was working, we did some testing using an LED. We were able to successfully get the LED to flash, a great accomplishment in our book.
Our next step was to get data from the sensors. We took the pH circuit which was connected to the Edison and hooked it up to the breadboard. This took us a good amount of time to figure out but after a lot of research, Vaul figured out that we just needed to add some pull up resistors.
With that quick addition, we were able to read data! We aren’t quite sure exactly what the sensor was reading but we will be working on figuring that out.
We have now written the code to receive data from all of the sensors, we just need to get them calibrated but we are currently unsure of how to do that. In the mean time, Nathan is working on designing the software interface and James is working on the database for the system, which is called SQLite, and is really easy to implement.
By the end of this semester we hope to have the software running, the database set up and have the sensors calibrated.
– Yvette