Adventures on Weather Station Kit
Hello EveryOne,
In this blog, I would like to share my experiences I came across while experimenting on the Weather Station kit. I followed the guidelines given in the manual that I got with the kit to setup the connections between NodeMCU and other sensors(BMP180, Light Intensity Sensor, DHT11, and OLED) and burnt the firmware to ESP8266 using ESP8266Flasher.exe. Then, I imported the library esp8266-weather-station-master.zip and opened the example WeatherStationDemo.ino and changed the values of thingspeak api_key, Wifi SSID and password, openWeatherMap api_id and location. Finally, I uploaded the file and once the upload is successful, I was not able to display anything neither on the OLED nor on the SerialMonitor. In the process of debugging the code, I tried to print the status of wifi connection using WiFi.status( ) and it throwed a garbage error like this(image titled baud rate error) .
Upon further investigation, I found that baud rates were different on the serial monitor(9600 baud) and in the code(serial.begin( 115200)) I was running. Then I further read about baud rate.
What is Baud Rate?
The baud rate specifies how fast data is sent over a serial line. It’s usually expressed in units of bits-per-second (bps). If you invert the baud rate, you can find out just how long it takes to transmit a single bit. This value determines how long the transmitter holds a serial line high/low or at what period the receiving device samples its line.
The common baud rate used is 9600bps where the speed isn’t critical. Other standard bauds are 1200, 2400, 4800, 19200, 38400, 57600, and 115200.
So, I changed the baud rate to 115200 baud on my serial monitor and uploaded again. This time I am confident that everything goes right. To my surprise, I saw this on my serial monitor.
The 6 is the value returned by WiFi.status( ) which says the wifi status is disconnected. I again started to investigate about why is my BMP180 sensor not getting detected? I saw a point to run I2c Scanner on this link(https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=480596.0) to see if the device is communicating on the bus to confirm the address. Then I learnt about what is I2C scanner? I2C scanner scans for devices and if a device is found, it is reported to the aurdino serial monitor. So, I tried running the I2C scanner. This is what I saw on the serial monitor.
For a moment I thought there was a problem with my connections and double checked the connections. Everything is fine. What’s wrong? I didnot solder the arduino header. Found it on this link(https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/12720/cant-detect-i2c-displays-with-arduino-nano). I was confident that the pins work without being soldered. So, ordered for the soldering kit and waiting for the kit to be delivered. Excited to know about more things.
Learnings from the experiment on the Weather Station kit to be continued…
