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Exterior temperature plan

A project log for Heroineclock II

Giant clock from a PIC18F6585, 135 cheap LEDs, foam core posterboard, hot glue, lots of hot glue

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 08/10/2020 at 04:420 Comments

With no need to spend all day commuting, there has been a growing desire to measure outdoor temperature without the grid & recording the indoor temperature.  There are a lot of temperature sensors on the internet, using ESP32 & ESP8266 boards, exotic capacitors, lithium phosphate batteries, space grade solar panels, sucking megawatts of power to promote the latest wifi standards.  It's all a bit overkill, but representative of a time that emphasizes very suboptimal, off the shelf parts using every multibillion dollar consortium's bloated standard.

The lion kingdom still has a lot of very optimized parts for this task from 10 years ago, when everything was purpose driven & had to be built from scratch.  Lions in those days evolved the equivalent of an IOT board out of a PIC18f14k50 & SI4421.  It used a milliamp at most when transmitting, & 3.3V.  The power consumption was so low by today's standards, it could run on some NiMH batteries & very cheap solar panels.   Lions wouldn't use Lithium batteries for this task because of the daily cycling.

A small armada of these boards was built 10 years ago for transmitting heading from copters.  Today, they would be prized for their remote sensing ability.  They could be reworked for transmitting temperature.  The home router would have a board for receiving the packets.

There isn't enough room to display the outdoor  temperature on a wall, but a web page could show it.  The temperature display could also receive packets & alternate between the indoor & outdoor temperatures.  There's no need to measure anything but temperature in Calif*.

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