Shannon Hicks

Most 16×2 LCD displays require 5v, but there are some that’ll work at 3.3v if you shop around. You could also use a 5v display with the Mayfly because you can use the 5v boost circuit to power it, but remember that you’ll have to do some logic-level shifting on the data pins. You could accomplish that by putting one of these inline between the…[Read more]

If you’re trying to use a Zigbee module and a microSD card with an Arduino board, you could buy a bee adapter shield and a memory card shield and stack them all together. If you’re logging data over time, you’ll also want a real-time-clock module to be able to timestamp the data on the memory card. But instead of trying to get 4 separate boards…[Read more]

No, you’ll never need an external supply even if you’re using dozens of 5TM soil moisture sensors. The reason is that the code I posted above will only power one sensor at a time. All of the other sensors are basically sleeping and using virtually no power until they are “woken up” one at a time by the call to their SDI12 address. One 5TM…[Read more]

What voltage were you putting on that white wire with the external supply?

If you use the “address_change” example, the sensor red wire needs to go on D9 if you want to run the code as-is. If you hook the sensor up as I described and run the address_change example and still don’t get anything, post a new photo of that setup. If you have a…[Read more]

I don’t know what the white box is in the top right of that one photo, but I’m assuming it’s an external power supply. I’m not sure why you are using that; the sensor definitely doesn’t need it and all 3 sensor wires are supposed to be connected directly to the Arduino board. As stated in several of my replies above, connect the sensor red wire…[Read more]

The code I posted above has been running for years on several different loggers, so it is correct. Have you verified that you correctly wired the signal, power, and ground lines of the sensors to your Arduino board. If you’re using a Mayfly and one of the Grove ports, you’ll need to turn on the switched external power for the grove port (D22),…[Read more]

The auxiliary A/D converter on the Mayfly is a ADS1115, so I prefer to use the Adafruit library for interacting with it (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_ADS1X15). It uses the I2C port with the default address of 0x48. If you want to add other external ADS1x15 chips, just set the address on any additional chips to 0x49, 0x4A, or 0x4B.

See…[Read more]

In case anyone checks this thread after looking for Mayfly boards on Amazon, we are currently sold out of boards and starter kits. More boards are currently being made, and we hope to have a large number of them back in stock on Amazon in February.

I’m hoping to have the protoshields listed on Amazon by the end of January.

It’s not mentioned above, but equally important to surviving the cold weather and reduction in sunlight is to increase the capacity of the LiPo battery being charged by the panel. Depending on the type of sensors used and their current draw, a smaller battery might have trouble making it through a long stormy winter week, no matter what size…[Read more]

It’s not mentioned above, but equally important to surviving the cold weather and reduction in sunlight is to increase the capacity of the LiPo battery being charged by the panel. Depending on the type of sensors used and their current draw, a smaller battery might have trouble making it through a long stormy winter week, no matter what size…[Read more]

Good find! It’s only the printing on the PC board that is backwards — the actual pin traces follow the standard Grove I2C Pinout: SCL-SDA-Vcc-Gnd (as shown on the schematic). So this shouldn’t be a problem for anyone using a standard Grove cable with connectors on both ends, but if you use one with flying leads or are hacking together your own…[Read more]

The kits are still in stock, and the single boards should be in stock later this week. More were sent to Amazon last week but their inventory processing has been slowed because of the holidays.

You are correct, the 5v boost circuit on the Mayfly v0.4 has a max current supply of 200ma.

The sleeping sketch I mentioned above works fine as long as you don’t use the SDI12 library at the same time. If you do, there’s some conflicts due to the SDI12 and SODAQ_Pcint libraries looking at the same ports. So I created modified versions of both libraries that fixes the conflict. (This conflict also happens if you use SoftwareSerial and…[Read more]

“20V-1A” is just the rating of the protection diode on the PC board. When choosing a solar panel for the Mayfly, you should only connect ones that are listed as 6 volt panels, and do not use a 9-volt or 12-volt panel.

The charging circuitry on the Mayfly isn’t capable of charging 2 parallel battery packs simultaneously, so it’s not advised to connect two packs to the Mayfly if you ever connect a mucroUSB cable or solar panel to it because either of those will start the charging process.

The second LIPO connector on the Mayfly is for providing a direct…[Read more]