Oh great. That makes me feel better also. Hope you have a stable development system to work off of. Great things still need to be made!

Akiba

Ha ha ha. it will be much more important than that later on. 

Stay tuned :)

Akiba

Hi Liam. 

To get the cables through the cable gland, we'll need to remove the wires from the terminal housing and then reinstall them. That will be in a later module.

Akiba

Hi Akiba, Jacinta,

Jjust to say I've complted all the videos through to end of 3.3.1b successfully - no problems!  It snowed here in the North of England last night, so was measuring temperature today!

Many thanks

Rob

Hi Everyone.

Just thought I'd add this to the list, as I have found it very useful.

Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk. (ISBN 978-1-25-958754-2)

It does the "high level" stuff and the detailed stuff very well and covers a lot of the devices and functions you may think of using in a project.

Cheers

Sean

Hi everyone,
while beeing separated from my Wildlogger board I still had to play with some sensors ;-)
Ceck out this wonderful project: https://sensebox.de/en/
Great to learn coding with this nice blockly interface:
https://blockly.sensebox.de/ardublockly/?board=sensebox-mcu&lang=en#
I had lots of fun monitoring the particulate matter influx from the illegal fireworks ;-)

Greetings from Austria,
Robin

Just saw this in the digest listing -- I'd hit the same problem with the WiFi SD cards being power hungry so we're developing something ourselves with Bluetooth, WIFI and LoRa. Currently pursuing funding to be able to develop it faster, but the intention is to opensource -- so would love to colaborate if anyone has interest/input/use cases? My PhD is in low power wireless sensor networks so nice to have a project it can actually be useful for. Providing we can get funding we'll have some 'free to you' prototypes for field testing.

Hi @openlx 

Sounds very interesting and love to hear more. So would your system work as a replacement SD card, or work with an existing card/card holder. I think there's a lot of potential for any conservation technology that uses SD cards, including camera traps. And can I ask what sort of ballpark levels of funding are we talking? 

Cheers,

Rob

It would slot in to replace the usual SD storage card, with power, controls and antenna etc. hanging off thin wires -- the idea being to fit as many existing products as possible. Looking to raise about £10k for the proof of concept and then same again for certification and initial run.

When you get a chance, can you please upload PDF's of the slides for the 3.2 videos? Thanks! 

@vickiedenicola 

In your code to set the baud rate you write: cmd.begin(57600);

Have you tried this with: Serial.begin(57600);

Hi Akiba,

Yeah that's right, it's bi-weekly, so next Tuesday will be the next event! I'll see if Carly can change the registration details so it'll show the new schedule.

Hi Greg. 

Wow, I'm glad the boards got to you. Jacinta and I are still working on the modules and I'm discovering creating video takes much longer than I had anticipated. Jacinta's more pro. For the course, we're targeting people that are completely new to Arduino and are deliberately pacing it so that it doesn't overwhelm everyone. But if you  have more experience and want to move forward on your own, here's some info and things you can do. 

We're running behind on documentation because all our time is taken creating video, assembling kits, and shipping out orders. But I've attached an image that should help out in understanding the pin mappings. 

I also recommend you test out the realtime clock and SdFat library on your board. You can download them from the Arduino library manager. Search for Rtc_PCF8563 and also the SdFat library in there. Also, the SdFat uses pin10 for the chip select. 

If you run into problems, we'll be dropping the videos for the command line, temperature/humidity sensor, and analog digital converter next Tuesday. Two weeks after, we'll be dropping the videos for realtime clock, SD card, and interrupts. 

You might also be interested in the video where we do the toplevel integration for the app and also the power and reliability optimizations. Those come in January. 

Good luck and if you get stuck, feel free to ask questions and the course videos will be rolling out soon :)

Akiba

p.s.  Once we have everyone on the same page with the fundamentals, then we have some ideas on really interesting follow-on courses/projects that build on that :)

FYI ordered the 11th, send the 13th, arrived in good order today, the 27th, in the UK .

Hi Egil. 
Thanks for the info. It looks like UK deliveries are pretty consistent at around 15 days on average +/- a few days. 
We are seeing much more variability for the US which is fast for some and slow for others. If anyone has any questions or wondering about their order, feel free to email us or PM us on Wildlabs. 

Akiba

Hi Rob. 

Congratulations on getting it to work!!

Yes, most batteries come with the JST-PH connector which has a 2mm pin spacing. If you have the equipment and components to crimp on a JST-XH connector which has a 2.54 mm spacing, that would fit into the Wildlogger board. As a warning, the virtual courses and the Freaklabs designs will standardize on the JST-XH connectors with 2.54 spacing because they're compatible with standard electronics prototyping gear like breadboards, and standard 2.54mm (0.100") header connectors. However the JST-XH connectors have polarity (they can only be plugged in one way) and lock (they require additional force to remove) which is why we are using them. 

Anyways so if you can crimp on JST-XH connectors, I recommend doing it for your Li-Po (Lithium-Ion-Polymer) battery. For single cell Li-Po batteries, they are compatible with WildLogger and can replace the stock battery case. We used the standard case because we were worried about what kind of batteries were commonly available throughout the world. Alkaline AA batteries are easily found everywhere so we decided to go with those for this first course. That may change in the future or that we offer different battery options for future courses and designs. 

Hope that helps.

Also for those that are wondering what JST-XH and JST-PH are, JST is a company that makes a type of connector that is commonly used for cable harnesses. In general, they are commonly used fo batteries, but also for other types of cables. JST-XH is a specific polarized locking cable connector with a 2.54 mm (0.100") pin pitch. JST-PH is a specific polarized locking cable connector with a 2.00mm pin pitch. In general, I prefer polarized, locking connectors because it's not possible to plug them in backwards and because they lock, it's hard to inadvertently pull them out or for them to fall out due to vibration. The standard connectors you might recognize are Molex 2.54 mm connectors which don't have polarity and locking so it's possible to plug in cables backwards and have them fall out. They're okay for general usage, but when possible we use JST-XH. I've attached a pic of Molex 2.54mm connectors and JST-XH 2.54mm connectors below for reference.

Also we will be covering crimping our own cable harnesses later. It's an important skill and cable harnesses are one of those unglamorous things that are critical for devices and deployment but aren't really talked about much.

Akiba

Hi Rob. 
The battery connector would be the easiest connector to change from PH to XH. Also the Wildlogger board can tolerate any battery input between 3.6V and 5V. We purposely chose this range so there is compatibility with single cell lithium-ion and lithium-ion-polymer batteries as well which are 4.2V nominally. 
Yes, batteries are fascinating and one of the biggest issues we deal with for these types of applications. They're often the limiting factor for drones, tracking collars, and long term monitoring devices. They also don't scale with technology so no matter how tech improves, we still essentially deal with decades old battery technology. Ha ha ha. 
Hopefully that seems like it might be changing :)

akiba