Reply To: Requirements for making a sensor compatible

We don’t have any set requirements for connection.  The Mayfly can communicate with almost anything that could communicate with an Arduino-style device.  Many users opt to user our ModularSensors library to run their loggers, but that library supports many protocols.

SDI-12 devices are very common in the environmental sensing field, so we have a lot of experience in communicating with SDI-12 slaves. The Arduino SDI-12 library is not a full implementation of the protocol and it’s much better tested for use as an SDI-12 master than as a slave.  You would need to do some footwork and testing to fully implement your sensor as a compliant SDI-12 slave. The protocol documents have fairly good flow diagrams explaining the timing, retries, and low power modes that the slave must implement.

Other protocols we have experience with are Modbus over RS232 or RS485, OneWire, and I2C (“Wire” or “Two Wire”).  If you look through the various sensor implementations in ModularSensors, you’ll see there are a lot of sensors where we use (or write and then use) a library that handles the lowest level back-and-forth needed to manage a sensor and then call that library’s “give me the current value” function within ModularSensors.