Reply To: XBee Networks of Mayfly Loggers – 900Mhz

Hey thanks for the overview. Welcome to the art of jumping in – and learning by doing (my philosophy though I’m an EE graduate) – though its beneficial to bring an engineering basis to analyzing the components, and then plug the components together.  The engineering basis can be thought of as a technical story – though for EE graduates we talk about engineering requirements.

I’d suggest looking at how to interface to the Campbell Scientific – that is can you inject some dimension less numbers in some fashion and have it come out the other side somewhere that can be used.  Maybe other people know more about it, than I do – but you may want the specific model numbers.  I looked at trying to work with a 20yr old CS recently, and concluded it really needed a whole new upgrade  – and actually finding the satellite channels for even an upgrade  was going to be one challenge.

At the simplest level, if you have some Analog inputs available on the Campbell scientific, then it could be case of “extending” those inputs remotely, and scaling the input voltage to your snow depth units.

So then on the snow depth sensor,  how does the sensor present its measurement   – from other posts on the board it seems you are trying to measure some voltages, so may be that is the snow depth measurement.  So then what is the range of the depth measurement. you want to make and what is the dynamic range and resolution on the sensor. That is the sensor might have a dynamic range of 3meter with an accuracy of +/10cm, but actually you are only interested in if there is 0-5cm increase of snow in a 1hour period.

Maybe some other people have better insights – but that would be my first guess at defining what you want to achieve