Author Topic: Anyone using a Campbell Scientific SR50 distance sensor for snow depth measure?  (Read 2835 times)

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Offline DaleReid

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I was looking through stuff for a connector and found a Campbell Scientific SR50 that I forgot I had bought on eBay and never got around to testing or trying to interface it.

I know there are a few guys trying to use the Arduino and other setups to measure snow with ultrasonic pulses. 

This thing seems to be what some Universities and the Forest Service uses to do recording, so I guess it must be more than a toy.  Brand new they are costly, but I'm in hopes to bench test this to see if it works.

If it does respond, has anyone got one to work reliably, and are there hints as to what to do with it?  I have read the couple threads about how other ingenious users here have got things to work with their own inventions, but it sounds a lot more challenging than just bolting a bracket on and running wires to a station (obviously, since this thing just outputs values, and those would have to be massaged by some sort of processor such as an Arduino or something to give a value, which then could be fed to something like Weather Display to track and display, like a secondary rain sensor or such.

I appreciate any chatter on the subject.  Dale
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Offline W3DRM

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Can I assume you have already gone to the Campbell Scientific website? They have some pretty detailed info on the SR50. I see it can actually output an ASCII formatted data stream. This may indicate that it would be relatively easy to put together some software to handle the data and report it.
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Offline DaleReid

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Don,
Thanks, yes I've gotten the .pdf manual and some other info, but was looking for some 'hands on' experience to say it wasn't as easy as it looks or a piece of cake, you know.

I hope to look it over carefully and apply some power to it to see if there is any smoke, or current draw, and then if the dogs don't go howling out of the room I'll see if there are data coming off the comm wires.

Dale
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Offline EA1EF

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sorry because are a old post, but now we are strongly interest in make to work some old SR50 sensors with arduino.

The PDF document have many usefull info. We thing for remote operation the difficultie are swich on off and step up 5v to 12v for source it with low consum...

also can be problematic send and understand commands to sensor, and case of 3v3 arduino need 3v3 ttl conversor to 5v ttl in all pins
more info or operative experience?


 

anything