Hacking national geographic weather station to raspberr Pi

[shiftline]

MosherIV- I'm assuming it works as t was brand new but I haven't tested it yet.  I can try hooking  it up to the tv later

MikerJ.  If it's property I may be better off going back and trying to tap into the sensors?

Wind speed is just a reed switch so I could count the pulses.  It would hist be figuring out how to read from the phototransistors


I'll hook up the full thing first and give it one more whirl of capturing bits then decide .  That capture was just the wind sensors talking to the base station (base station transmits signals to tv box)

[shiftline]

To tap into the circuit after the phototransistor would I want to tap into the output of the transistor?

[shiftline]

I hooked the logic analyzer up to the negative side of the phototransistors

East


West


South


North

[shiftline]

Here's the signal after the transistors

[MosherIV]

I do not think the logic analyser is the best instrument to use for probing transistors. Logic analysers only detect logic 1 ( >2.7V) and logic 0 ( < 0.3V). An oscilloscope would be the instrument to use so we can understand what is going on.
What does before and after the transistors mean?

The designers have already done the hard work of interfacing to the sensros, I would not try to work around their design. It would be better (and easier) to figure out what the outout is.
It could be a lot of work to figure out the sensors and how to interface to them reliably.

[AndreasF]

I hooked the logic analyzer up to the negative side of the phototransistors
...

I wouldn't use the logic analyzer for that. It's going to be an analogue signal that may not even be in logic level range. All the back and forth that you see at the end (and sometime beginning) is probably the voltage slowly transitioning the logic level threshold. Most likely it will feed into a Schmitt-trigger type input at whatever controller the board is using to avoid this sort of thing.

[shiftline]

Thanks for the feed back.   I'll try putting it on the scope tonight (data/sclk pins)

Before transistor meant pulling the signal from
The phototransistor    And after meant pulling it from the output of the phototransistor > resistor transistor


As a disclaimer I still don't fully know what I'm doing.. So it's a learning process!

[Perry L]

Hi there.

I just got my weather station today at a used store in town.
If you are not sure and don't want to mess the inside up I would add my own switch and save the rest of the guts for another day.
For me what I'm doing with mine is connecting it up to my surveillance system so the family can see it from anywhere over the network and internet.
I have 2 8 channel DVRs for surveillance. 1 is just connected to my network and the other one is over the internet.

I had just started printing all the parts last week. But now that I have this I don't have to.  I just have to wire it in and for the most part done.
But I might have to do what I said up top because I need to monitor the wind.
I have to know when the wind is to strong so that I can flatten my solar panels. So the wind does not rip them off my roof.

I have just started looking for the manual. It looks like that is the only thing missing. If you know were I could find it that would be great.

Good luck And if you have any questions just ask.

[Perry L]

Perry here again.
Did you think of the data lines being rs485.
And I know its been a little bit but did you find any new info about the way the data is moving?

Thanks again.

[Perry L]

Perry here Again.

Me with out a manual. What is the Antenna for in the connection box for out side?
Any Ideas.

I have not opened any of my parts yet. It is late and I just cant be up all night tonight. So I cant open anything or really get started.
Canada Day tomorrow. Big Big party.  Lots to drink and eat 30-40 people coming over. And Its going to be a very late night.

I do feel very sorry for the poor DOGS in the neighborhood.  (Not really! Now its my turn.)

Thanks again.

[shiftline]

Hey perry! Did you ever get anywhere with yours?  This project is on the side burner but your inspiring me
To break it out again and finish getting it going


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[C]

Let me state what others have already suggested a different way.

If you have all the parts, set it up so that it works as intended.

Now you have two easy spots to spy on what it is doing and gain from all that is already done.

You could spy on connections between outside unit and outside transmitter.
You could spy on connections between inside unit and inside transmitter.
 
Why spy, because the unit will keep functioning if your spy connections do not do something like draw to much current to prevent normal operation.

You now have what is shown on TV to see if your guess is correct with the data format  on spy connections is correct.