Author Topic: Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor  (Read 15954 times)

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Offline SLOweather

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Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor
« on: March 02, 2018, 09:36:39 AM »
With the lack of rain locally this season, I haven't been able to play with this much until yesterday.

This trial was done using an RG11 in drop counter mode. In an earlier unpublished experiment, I logged drop counts every second. That was too fast, but I did observe one characteristic of the RG11. In drop counter mode, rather than one relay click immediately on detecting a drop, when multiple drops are detected in a short time, it appears to batch them up and then click as many as 5 times in a row, maybe more. The most number of counts I could get was 5 per second.

So, yesterday's test was recording the total counts 1x per minute. This morning, I downloaded the log into Excel, subtracted the last minute's total drop count  from the next minute to get drops per minute, and graphed the resulting data.



One other note on this graph. In order to just get the drop count data, I had the controller stop logging after 5 minutes of no drops counted. So, zero count flat lines are an indeterminate length of time. Actually, in looking at the graph, that's almost 11 hours of data (at least 649 minutes) so there is very little down time in there...

Like my acoustic disdrometer, it's pretty cool to have enough resolution to be able to see bands of rain pass by.

Next is to try to get some correlation between this drops per minute value and something more familiar like inches per hour. That's actually what started this. The standard inches per hour as measured on one of my Davis stations calculates the rain rate based on the time between tips of the rain gauge.  For example an average rate of 0.10" per hour is a tip every 6 minutes. The actual rain fall intensity can vary a lot in that 6 minutes.

The end goal is to use the drops/minute to drive some sort of indicator through an Arduino or other controller, maybe a dial gauge, bar graph, or even a color changing LED.

Offline weatherstation1

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Re: Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor
« Reply #1 on: January 09, 2019, 01:09:27 AM »
I also bought a RG-11 rainfall sensor before. If it only senses rainfall, it's no problem. But if it is to monitor rainfall, there will be a big problem. There is a big gap between drizzle and heavy rain and dumper rain gauge. I would like to ask if the manufacturer has an upgraded firmware program to solve this problem now.
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Offline SLOweather

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Re: Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2019, 09:28:10 AM »
Have you tried contacting the manufacturer? http://rainsensors.com/


I also bought a RG-11 rainfall sensor before. If it only senses rainfall, it's no problem. But if it is to monitor rainfall, there will be a big problem. There is a big gap between drizzle and heavy rain and dumper rain gauge. I would like to ask if the manufacturer has an upgraded firmware program to solve this problem now.

Offline blueW

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Re: Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor
« Reply #3 on: October 17, 2021, 08:52:15 AM »
The RG-11 sensor has a mostly undocumented serial interface I'm trying to use.
Has someone experience with it?
I've written some Code for a ESP8622 (Wemos D1 mini) together with MQTT.
That seems to work, but I still have to figure out the meaning of the values I get.

Here is my code:
https://gitlab.com/pbueker/rg-11-rain-gauge-wifi

Offline jmbinette

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Re: Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor
« Reply #4 on: May 03, 2023, 04:33:55 PM »
Hi !

Great post and just had a quick look at the code !

Do you have a new version or is it still valid ?
Also do you think I could port this to ESPHOME easily ?

Thanks !

Offline Aussie Susan

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Re: Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor
« Reply #5 on: May 03, 2023, 10:58:41 PM »
At risk of 'hijacking' this thread, I have an RG-15 that, at least in my experience, is woeful.
I have it connected to an XBee3 and ultimately my Home Assistant via an ESP32 and MQTT.
In my experience I am getting nearly continuous 'rainfall' even on the sunniest of summer days. It does trend upwards a little when it does actually rain but the variations I'm seeing normally (i.e. no rain) make it virtually impossible to separate the signal from the 'noise'.
Does anyone else have any experience wth this rain gauge and/or is this a common symptom for the RG-xx family of gauges?
Susan

Offline Aussie Susan

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Re: Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor
« Reply #6 on: July 23, 2023, 11:01:43 PM »
I've managed to solve my problem with the RG-15 and i thought that it *might* be useful to other RG-xx users.
The RG-15 has two ways to power it: 5V and 3V3.
For various reasons (mainly because the device it was attached to had 3V3 only) I was using the 3V3 connecting to power it. However that seems to be the cause of the problems I was having (lots of spurious 'rainfall' signals).
As soon as I switched to powering the device from the 5V connection all that went away, and I now have a (seemingly) reliable rain gauge.
I'm now sending the 'rain accumulation' figure to my Home Assistant and then using a 'statistics' integration to provide a daily rainfall figure.
Susan

 

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