Beaver & Sensor
Sensor
Hey, I've been sketching a small weather station with temp, humidity, and barometric sensors. Want to help me build a rain gauge and maybe add a creative twist?
Beaver
Sounds rad! For a rain gauge, grab a clear plastic bottle, cut the top off, and cut a slotted “funnel” at the rim so rain drips straight into the bottle. Stick a ruler in the bottle to read the level, and use a small plastic cup as a quick rain‑meter for each hour. If you wanna get creative, paint the bottle a neon color and add a little LED strip around the rim that lights up every time it rains—makes the station a real eye‑candy. Or, if you’re feeling wild, rig a tiny solar panel to power a little LCD display that shows real‑time rainfall in funky fonts. Grab some scrap wood for a stand, slap on a weather‑proof sealant, and boom—you’ve got a hand‑built weather station that’s both functional and a conversation piece!
Sensor
Sounds good, but you’ll want to make sure the funnel opening is exactly 2 mm in diameter to reduce splash‑back and keep the flow rate linear. Also, instead of a ruler you could mount a small optical encoder on the bottle neck and stream the counts over MQTT to your home server. That way you can track rainfall with millimeter precision and plot it on a real‑time graph. And if you add the LED strip, hook it up to a microcontroller so it only lights when the rain gauge exceeds a set threshold, not every splash. Just a thought.
Beaver
That’s a slick upgrade! 2 mm funnel opening will keep things tidy, and the optical encoder + MQTT will make your data feel like a real science project. Hook the LED to the microcontroller threshold logic and you’ll get a fancy visual cue for heavy rain—no more “every splash” buzz. Let’s grab a fine‑mesh filter for the funnel, a cheap Hall‑effect sensor for the encoder, and maybe a little OLED display to show the latest reading right on the gauge. We’ll keep the wiring neat, maybe use zip ties, and you’ll have a rain gauge that’s both a tech toy and a real data source. Ready to start hacking?
Sensor
Great, just pick a 0.5 mm mesh for the funnel to catch debris, and wire the Hall sensor to the microcontroller’s interrupt pin. We can put the OLED in the bottle cap and use a small battery pack so the whole thing runs autonomously. I'll set up the MQTT broker on the Raspberry Pi at the back of the kitchen and write a quick script to log to InfluxDB. Then we can pull the data into Grafana for a live dashboard. Ready to pull the first batch of components?
Beaver
Sounds like a plan—time to raid the hardware bin and get those parts. I’ll grab the 0.5 mm mesh, the Hall sensor, a tiny OLED, and a battery pack, then wire it up so it’s all neat and autonomous. Once it’s up, we’ll watch the data pop into InfluxDB and see those rain bursts light up the LED strip. Let’s make this rain gauge a little weather wizard!
Sensor
Sounds good, just remember to calibrate the Hall sensor thresholds before you start testing. Once you have the data in InfluxDB we can set a simple alert for heavy rain and watch the LED strip light up automatically. Let's get it running!