Topic: Piezo rain sensor?

[AbuMaia]

This just came up on Hackaday.com, and my first thought was of you guys. Do you think something like this could be set up and calibrated as a rain counter, or just as a "it's raining" sensor?

[DanS]

Pretty neat way to detect "it's raining". He used the piezo speaker as a high energy microphone.

[AbuMaia]

More than that, the piezo speaker is the power source for the LED as well, generated by the impact of the raindrop.

[SLOweather]

Well, I built a sound card based piezo device similar to this back in 2008, that was discussed here:
http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=1428.msg10392#msg10392.

And it was revisited just this week in this thread:
http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=13548.msg132802#msg132802

The concept has some promise. It's similar to the Hydreon RG-11 optical rain sensor. The problems lie in 1) the variability of raindrop size/volume, and 2) differentiating 2 or more drops hitting simultaneously or nearly so. 

[AbuMaia]

It seems to me that with a collector, like in the video, you might eliminate those two problems.

[miraculon]

I posted this a while back with a link to a recorded mp3 of sleet.

The microphone in my IP cam picks up precipitation hitting the wxproof housing quite well, or at least the sleet/rain/pellets variety. The rumble picked up by wind (and traffic/dogs/etc) would probably make this unsuitable for some kind of automated setup however.

http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=10732.msg103143#msg103143

Greg

[Bushman]

I think this is an awesome experiment!  http://www.apl.washington.edu/edu_opportunities/graduate_research/l_lezamiz.html  I need to try something like that.

[Weather Display]

I have added support for this now to WD
in a new zip update
see under setup, advancec/misc

works in testing here via a microphone I plugged into my laptop

[SLOweather]

Cool! I look forward to trying it. Unfortunately, no rain scheduled in the extended forecast, but I'll see about getting it set up and tested.

[Bushman]

Cool! I look forward to trying it. Unfortunately, no rain scheduled in the extended forecast, but I'll see about getting it set up and tested.

Got a lawn sprinkler handy?