Weather Station Hardware > Hydreon RG-11 Optical Rain Gauge/Sensor

Another cut at the RG11 as a rain intensity sensor

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SLOweather:
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 In an earlier unpublished experiment, I logged drop counts every second.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.

weatherstation1:
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.

SLOweather:
Have you tried contacting the manufacturer? http://rainsensors.com/



--- Quote from: weatherstation1 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.

--- End quote ---

blueW:
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

jmbinette:
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 !

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