At the beginning of this year (2013) I decided to carry out a full refurb of the weather station. When I took the station down last year (2012) I found lots of issues with it, mainly to do with the inconnecting wires between the different sensors. I decided to improve the ease of connecting the sensors together. Be it that the sensors use RJ45 connectors, it seemed sensible to use water/weatherproof RJ45 connectors. I found a good supply at solwise. The only problem is that they are quite large with respect to the size of the sensor housings. So major rebuild of each housing was required.
The station also need a bit of a repaint, it was showing signs of deterioration. The last time the parts were painted was many years ago.
The left picture is the base of the Stevenson's screen, and the right is the base of the wet leaf sensor mount.
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As the wet leaf sensor was a little unstable putting the mounting poll through the connection box seems the ideal solution. This was pretty tricky to achieve as the main mounting poll had to be in the centre of the base, the housing base and the housing lid.
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Here you can see the wet leaf sensor housing quite clearly here showing the difficulties of modifying it. The holes in the housing are for the waterproof RJ45s
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More of the leaf sensor housing
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This is the housing for the UV sensor, again showing the waterproof RJ45s and also some lead to make sure it does not move around.
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More lead
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Here is the start of the construction of the splitter boxes. The idea of these boxes is to allow the 1wire bus to branch to the sensor and back, holding true to the way 1wire network needs to laid out/connected. The other advantage of this, is that the sensor can be isolated from the rest of the for problem determination.
The following pictures are the RJ45 splitter board that is fitted within the housing. This allows easy connection of the waterproof RJ45 sockets fitted in the housing. I used RJ45 couplers, the ones a got easily split and disassemble.
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Little bit a paint..
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These are the images of the wiring harness in the splitter box.
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These pictures should give a good idea of how they are wired, the left shows the 1wire bus being split out and back to the third connector.
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Here is the internals of the splitter box. As the RJ45s take a large amount of space, I fitted stand-offs which I then mounted the splitter board on. The socket on it's own is the connector for the sensor the box is being used for.
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This shows the splitter board and then it mounted in the housing with the RJ45 waterproofs connected. You will see the top cable has a label on it, this is the one to the sensor, so when I have to take it apart I will not have to trace the cables around in the housing.
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More construction pictures of the splitter boxes
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The finished item
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To protect the computer that is running the station I have fitted a lightning arrestor to the 1wire bus. This sourced from solwise. I also have a lightning earthing rod in the ground, which it's connected to.
The bottom picture is the splitter box for the soil temperature sensor.
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