Author Topic: Lacrosse 2317 hardware  (Read 6495 times)

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Offline thewxguy

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Lacrosse 2317 hardware
« on: January 19, 2007, 06:47:59 PM »
Hi, new to the group here.
If anyone has any information on the hardware details of the wind sensor used in the lacrosse 2317 I'd like to exchange notes.  This is the small turbine type sensor as opposed to the dixie cup version.  I think that there's basically 2 design styles in this range of equipment.

I'm a hopeless hardware tinkerer and I'm interested in making some LED displays or meters that will provide real time wind information.  Its hard to beat those moving indicators to get a real feel for what the wind is doing.

I've got some test equipment and I'm not afraid to tear into things but it would help a lot if someone here has some schematics or something like that to share with me.  Of course I'll post whatever I find only being limited by my html authoring.

I'm already planning to replace that telephone cable that goes to the wind sensor with something shielded.  It seems that I'm like everyone else in that occasionally due to noise or something I just get some wacky readings.

Don

Offline n0rua

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Re: Lacrosse 2317 hardware
« Reply #1 on: July 11, 2007, 11:27:07 PM »
Hi Don,

I was amazed to see that you're doing exactly what I am doing, with the same hardware  8)

Have you made any progress? I've just started tinkering and probing the wires for a voltage change when the vane and turbine spin.  So far I see a negative voltage (too small for my junky Rat Shack multimeter to read) when the vane spins in a given direction.

Ultimately I'd like to hook this thing up to a Make Microcontroller: http://makezine.com/controller/

I'm mostly interested in figuring out how to interpret the voltage coming down the wires and translate it into a wind direction/speed.

The last few issues of Nuts & Volts magazine have talked about building your own weather station, as well.

Tony

Offline SLOweather

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Re: Lacrosse 2317 hardware
« Reply #2 on: July 12, 2007, 12:16:21 AM »
While I don't have any direct experience with LaCrosse, here are a few thoughts gleaned from designing my own and working with other equipment.

The Wind Vane (the arrow thingy that shows direction) is likely an analog voltage, from 0 to whatever the supply voltage is.

The Anemometer (the cups or turbine) is likely a voltage pulse proportional to the wind speed, probably one pulse per revolution of the cups or turbine blade.

If you have a 4 wire connection to the wind unit, one wire is probably ground, and one is the supply voltage (that one would be constant). On a Davis VP2, it's about 5 volts.

One of the other wires would be the wind vane and would vary between zero and the supply voltage depending on the position of the vane. If I were designing it, North would be the transition between 0 and full voltage, and half of the supply voltage would be due South. east would be 1/4 voltage.

And the last wire would be the 0 to full-voltage pulse for the anemometer. That's assuming the wind speed sensor is a rotating magnet and a reed switch.

There are more elegant and expensive ways to do it, but for cheap (LaCrosse) I'd bet that this is how it works.

Be clear what you are measuring. "Vane" = wind direction. "Anemometer" (cups or turbine/propeller) = speed.

Turned slow enough (ie: by hand) you should be able to see the anemometer pulses on a DMM or VOM.

Offline wuhu_software

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Re: Lacrosse 2317 hardware
« Reply #3 on: July 12, 2007, 08:17:34 AM »
The anemometer is more of an intelligent embedded device that transmits wind speed and direction in the form of a serial data block to the remote thermo unit.

You can read some of the details here, posted by a user that decoded the protocol:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Lacrosse_weather_stations/message/1672

What you might be able to do is to hack the turbine pick-up sensor and use a cup design like the Inspeed Vortex:

http://www.inspeed.com/anemometers/Vortex_Wind_Sensor.asp

If you do manage to hack in this cup design, you will probably need to be able to tweak the wind speed reported by the remote thermo. This would probably be a straight forward linear tweak that could be done in software.

Rather than hacking the La Crosse, I would like to build a weather station based on the USB device called Labjack. This device supports digitial in/out, analog in/out, and high speed counters. If anyone is interested in working on such a project, let me know.

http://www.labjack.com/labjack_u3.php?prodId=25

Offline SLOweather

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Re: Lacrosse 2317 hardware
« Reply #4 on: July 12, 2007, 09:56:27 AM »
The Weather Display forum has an active home-built board, and WD will interface with Lab-Jack and One-Wire stuff. You might check over there.

 

anything