Reply To: Connecting to the Internet

Here’s a couple photos of the UnoEthernet/Xbee receiver I built a long time ago. I has been running non-stop since February 2013 and receives about 4500 transmissions per day. With an average of 10 parameters per transmission, that’s 16.5 million parameters per year, so this little box has passed over 80 million parameters into my simple database in the past 5 years. I haven’t had to restart it do anything in the past 5 years except once when I had to update the IP address of the destination website nameserver when the host did some updates that resulted in a new address.

The Xbee module is a XbeePro 900Mhz and is mounted to an Xbee adapter board from Adafruit. I drilled holes in the case and bent the LEDs so that they poke through the case you can see the Xbee’s status. It’s held on to the case by the SMA jack of the XbeePro. It’s connected to a coax line that runs to the roof where we mounted a high-gain omnidirectional antenna.

This is what we use for receiving data from all of the stations within about a mile of our research lab. The rest of our dataloggers in other locations send data to the database via cellular modules with a $5/month cell plan from Hologram.io

We have more than 100 loggers streaming live data every 5 minutes, that adds up to around 9 million points per month and over 100 million points per year.